I love that story because it reminds me to always look for the deeper reasoning behind shallow first impressions - the only reason a pen seems like an expensive waste is because I'm ignorant of the full complexity behind the decision to use pens over pencils. As a programmer, it's easy to walk into a room full of seemingly simple manual processes and tell everyone they need to be automated out of a job, but it's highly disrespectful to their years of specialized experience.

Always good to be humble and remember that I'm not smarter than a rocket scientist in their own field.