I often use this story as an example for people of how programming can save them time and make them more efficient. It's from the introduction to Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, which is also a good resource for them if they decide they do want to pursue such benefits: https://automatetheboringstuff.com/2e/chapter0/#calibre_link...

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“You’ve just done in two hours what it takes the three of us two days to do.” My college roommate was working at a retail electronics store in the early 2000s. Occasionally, the store would receive a spreadsheet of thousands of product prices from other stores. A team of three employees would print the spreadsheet onto a thick stack of paper and split it among themselves. For each product price, they would look up their store’s price and note all the products that their competitors sold for less. It usually took a couple of days.

“You know, I could write a program to do that if you have the original file for the printouts,” my roommate told them, when he saw them sitting on the floor with papers scattered and stacked all around.

After a couple of hours, he had a short program that read a competitor’s price from a file, found the product in the store’s database, and noted whether the competitor was cheaper. He was still new to programming, so he spent most of his time looking up documentation in a programming book. The actual program took only a few seconds to run. My roommate and his co-workers took an extra-long lunch that day.

This is the power of computer programming. A computer is like a Swiss Army knife that you can configure for countless tasks. Many people spend hours clicking and typing to perform repetitive tasks, unaware that the machine they’re using could do their job in seconds if they gave it the right instructions.