At work we do many silly and inefficient things. Like many places they grow out of necessity, lack of time and the patch work that is unplanned life.
One of the really awful things we do revolves around collecting shipping data from one of our carriers. To pick up data we need to pull every file in a single virtual directory on three FTP servers, down to one single inbound directory on our AIX server. Should be simple, a little cron, and a some shell and jobs done.
BUT NO!, we have to run the FTP via some proprietary SSL VPN client from Aventail, and our carrier only provided us with a Windows client. So instead I login to the Telletubbies PC, FTP the files down to a Samba share, and then let cron take over.
