On my first sysadmin job fresh out of school I got a locked down laptop where nothing could be installed. So no Python, no Perl, no nothing, except Batch files. My morning job consisted of going through hundreds of report emails from all systems to identify issues (full disks, high nr of errors, etc), every morning, every day. This could easily be scripted and save me a lot of time, but no such luck for me. Until I found an application in the "allowed software catalog" which came installed with a Python interpreter. Python 1.x mind you, but nonetheless: Python. Within a few days I automated my morning tasks and got some free time to play with the servers in the lab to beef up my networking skills :).