The nameless slave will be king of an unknown country.

Sometimes it's an unrewarding thing to be Good at Computers. Take today, for instance, which saw the triumphant end to long-ongoing puzzle. I put about twenty hours of work altogether into making a single application work on a single computer without reformatting the hard disk, because my coworker had to have that application and because I only reformat hard disks as an absolute last resort (and there was no guarantee that a reformat would actually fix the problem); I researched and configured and reconfigured and uninstalled and reinstalled and messed around with the registry and lo! I finally got it fixed just in time for lunch, after about three months of sporadic yet highly frustrating labor. I watched her computer send a test fax (it's a fax-over-pc application), ran downstairs to intercept it, and practically wept with joy when I watched our fax machine print it out. I felt as though a parade should be held in my honor. I felt that I should be allowed to rule the world for a day.

But here's what happened instead: everyone just went about their business as if I had totally not just performed a miracle, can you believe it? The woman whose computer it was thanked me nicely, my coworkers said that it would be fine for me to have that painful ordeal behind me, and everyone went back to work, and everyone knew that I'd made it happen, but everyone figured that ho-hum, it was all in a day's work for a trusty IT professional. Which is true to a certain degree, of course, but some jobs are harder than others, man, and and and.

WHERE IS MY PARADE. WHERE ARE MY THRONE, CROWN, SCEPTRE, AND ORB. I WANT MY VALIDATION, DAMN IT.