Yesterday we had a representative of one of our clients in for a meeting. I can't say who it was, or what company they where from but I spent most of the day working on some simple PHP programs for them. I had worked on them before, but they wanted some changes to be done. So at about 4pm this client comes to my desk and says that he has this problem that he thinks I may be able to help with.
He wanted a program that would take in multiple IP addresses and find out not only where in the world they were from, but also who the IP address belonged to, basically the ISP of these IP addresses. The interesting thing was that I was in a race with one of their programmers who had been working on the same thing since Monday and was several hours away from completing it. So I started work.
At about 12:00 today I had a fully working IP address to ISP lookup tool which I packaged up and sent off to them. The client said it was exactly what he was looking for and that the data that their programmer had come up with was only a fraction of the information that my tool displayed. It also allowed the user to export the data into a CSV file, which he thought was brilliant.
Paul (my company director) was very impressed (he even shook my hand) and it looks as though I have made the company a lot of money. But not only that, on a personal level I beat a lead developer in another company by at least 4 days to produce a fully working tool that was said to be impossible.
Sometimes I surprise even myself!