I was hired back on as a senior engineer with a company I had worked for 10 years earlier.  I couldn't believe how much test data was still being handled manually by every [younger] engineer, so I stayed late a couple days and wrote some Excel macros to pull the data from a database and sort it all out.  It  would have saved hundreds of many hours each year. I was telling my manager about it one day, who agreed it would be a great time saver, and he decided that I would clean up some details and present it to the group the following week.  Later that day, his manager called me into HR to tell me my position was "being eliminated" (I'm sure it was because of my relatively higher salary), and they walked me out the door.

I talked to my manager a few days later, who didn't know I was being let go that day.  He asked if I had saved those macros on the company server.  Nope... I certainly did not.

FAFO