When customers picked up their orders from our warehouse, they signed the A4 sized receipt. We made a copy using a photocopier, and kept our copy in a box. Then the following month, we moved the box into a pallet. When the pallet was full of these boxes, we shrink-wrapped it and fork-lifted it into a shelf in the warehouse. After a few years, they had pallets after pallets of receipts.

Customers often called to dispute charges on their credit card, this was an expensive furniture store warehouse. So we would have to dig up those pallets with the fork lift and look for a single signed copy of the receipt to defend the charge. Sometimes, it took days to find. Other times, we never found the copies.

When I took over the warehouse, I installed photoshop on the main computer. IT gave me hell for it. Then I set up a batch job to scan those receipts into 3 parts: Full page, order number section, signature section. I used a .bat file to launch the OCR app that came with the printer and rename the files to include the order number. Now all I had to do at the end of the day, was stack the hundreds of receipt into the printer and watch the computers do my job.

When a customer complained, all I had to do was enter the order number in a dynamic excel sheet and the copy of the receipt was loaded. It took seconds. Everyone in the warehouse called me lazy. But they were happy to continue using my system. Although, the printer/scanner mysteriously broke after I left and they were forced to go back to the manual way.

And that was my first real world programming experience.