I apologize for using yet another analogy, but its the best way to talk about this.
Lets say you need to transport a newspaper 50 feet, or perhaps half a block, whichever makes this more ridiculous. The periodical in question is made of special paper that sometimes catches fire when exposed to sunlight, rain, or the sweet tears of an exasperated programmer. For this reason you must encase the newspaper in a container. There is one and only one container available. It was designed five years ago by someone who did not read newspapers and but loved steel and thought the case needed to be steel five inches thick with a nuclear power source to open and close it. Obviously this steel container is rather heavy, but it is not compatible with any wheelbarrows, handcarts, pack animals, forklifts, pickup trucks, specially evolved pokemon, or any other sane (comparatively) method of transportation for this device. The ridiculously burdensome newspaper container can only be transported by affixing it to the back of a white 2009 Honda Prius with no less than 17 ratcheting cables, the configuration of which can only be set after the driver is inside because those cables block all of the doors and windows. Coaxing the driver inside is no trivial matter (0:49).
Unfortunately for you and the sanity of this story, Prius itself doesn't work on the road which has about a million potholes in it. For this reason we need a heavily modified Soviet T-34 Tank, which nobody updates anymore so you're out of luck if it breaks down. The prius can only be hooked up to the tank by lifting the prius onto the back of the tank (so it looks like the two vehicles are doing something obscene) with a CH-54A helicopter. Hooking up and unhooking the chains so the Prius can be lifted by the CH-54A is non-trivial but we will skip that process for brevity.
Once the Prius is properly mounting the T-34, the tank no longer has the torque necessary to pull the Prius' weight in addition to its own (suprising, I know--I told you it was heavily modified), so we have to hook up a Jeep Wrangler to pull it. The Jeep Wrangler has been modified so that it the engine starts up only if a really gay looking pink statue of a unicorn is precariously balanced across the hood, one hoof pressing down seductively on a battery contact.
Once we have all this in place, transporting the newspaper is a simple matter of waving to the driver of the Wrangler, and the rest of the trasportation operation is actually done completely automatically without any further direction from us. In fact, the gay unicorn setup is often touted as a boon to newspaper transportation. Also in fact, we reuse use the same method to transport nuclear missiles and small pandas.
Why did I tell you about this? I am that programmer--that programmer that just wants to transport a newspaper 50 feet. From the beginning of my last project (or the last one I cared about, anyway) I tried to involve as few of those ridiculous contraptions as I could. I failed (like an outnumbered squad of Space Marines tactically giving ground--not what they are meant for--to wave after wave of ugly alien soldiers) in all aspects, I thought, except for one: I had gotten rid of the damn unicorn on the jeep. Until today, when we were wondering why my program isn't running. Apparently, its necessary. That is what its like programming here. This is not to say that I'm unhappy. I just hold everything and everyone [else] to a bar of near-perfection and I'm a little frustrated that no one can live up to it.
In fact, if you'd like to hear about this project I worked on at another job, just try to imagine a Meerkat that only eats Pepper Jack cheese covered by mold on approximately 42-55% of its surface, and one of the other programmers keeps sniffing the cheese and disturbing the mold content which means you have to....
[Edit]
Well it runs now. I know you were wondering. Also I have "Gold Guns Girls" stuck in my head again.
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