I had this bad when I first got into embedded design. I built a Nixie tube clock with a Parallax SX chip in raw assembly.

Running at 4MHz, I had to give it a nop loop where it spun for 4 million iterations just to increment the clock for a second. It lived a whole life between seconds and it would do this thanklessly tedious work forever.

Or how about airbag sensors or seatbelt pretensioners that check sensors thousands of times a second for years in the off chance that they detect a crash and save the life of a person who they will never comprehend for the 100ms duration of a crash just to get scrapped with the rest of the vehicle.

At one point I wanted to write a short story based on this concept. A story of unrequited love between a person and a machine that they don’t even know about.