I think it's always been part of my job (including part of th eparts that have had absolutely nothing to do with databases) to make parts of my job boring. One irate customer ringing me at 4am in the middle of my vacation and demanding that I escalate his problem immediately to the CEO was enough of the wrong sort of "excitement" for a lifetime (especially as I wasn't going to admit to any customer that we hadn't appointed a new CEO after the last one departed), and I had plenty other disasters to recover in my various jobs so I hadn't made things boring enough; of course it sometimes needs money which just isn't there to make things boring - in my last job our customers weren't going to pay for clustered systems, for enterprise (instead of standard) licences, or for anything else to make their systems really reliable, so the systems were vulnerable, but they still had a 24X7 requirement. But everything I could automate I did automate (and wrote an app for my desktop to analyse the emails all the monitoring tools I devised sent, so that I didn't have to look at mundane ones (I automated a lot of the recovery actions too, so a typical email say such and such a problem happened at a particular customer site and was fixed by such and such an action, so I didn't need to see it; but the frequency of the automatic fix could be a performance issue, so I needed to know how often they happened).

On the other hand, there are other parts of the job which I've never wanted to make boring - mentoring, working out what requirements are, proposing new research projects, going and meeting new people in new places, inventing new algorithms, doing real research. I don't see how those things can be automated. And if they could I would have had to find a different job, because I don't like life without (the right sort of) excitement.