Got off my bum and wrote the required Perl scripts to manipulate the Cisco router so I could take the extra ISDN phone line up and down as required.

I was prepared to code Telnet calls using Perl's socket calls but this wasn't necessary, because someone had already written a Net::Telnet module to do this. Moreover, someone else had even taken it a step further and written a module on top of that called Net::Telnet::Cisco. This reduced my job down to installing the two new modules and creating scripts just a handful of lines long.

This is what makes Perl great.