I may be in the minority, being that I came to programming from a desire to kill the boring shit that constituted most of my old job, but I really enjoy killing boring shit. It might be a psychological tic, but even if I have under 10 users for a given script I love seeing them ask "Wait that's all I have to do?" when you show them that their computers are now doing their mindless bullshit almost instantly. Sure the given business logic might be trivial, but I've always gotten a relatively bigger kick out of user satisfaction than a fascinating problem with little user impact. (not to say that fascinating problems are either useless or uninteresting, I rather enjoy playing around with hard problems, it's just preferences of rewards).
interestingly, in some corporate places, the inefficiency is so built into the politics that if you tried to automate someone's job away, they might be scared of you! I had a friend who worked at a bank, and in one week, automated the manual process that used to take the "team" months to do (mostly excel manual data entry and cleanup). I was told they were scared of being made redundant...
