when it actually works

The most triumphant moments in my day are when nothing happens. When you execute the command, and the machine just goes and does it, no fuss... no faults generated, no fuses blown, no really weird readings... that's when you know you've done a good job. There are a lot of different components that need to work together, each designed by different people who may not have had a perfect grasp of their interfaces; even when you've defined everything perfectly, things are bound to fall through the cracks. Not to mention that the software needs to be tuned to the prickly hardware, or perhaps the other way around.

We can work for days, weeks, trying to get it all to play together nicely.

This time the tech flicked a switch, and the machinery hummed to life. A bunch of green lights came on. For a split second, we were utterly still, eyes flicking to the fuses, the fault lights, the readouts.

The lights stayed green, and we all let out cries of "yeah!" and high-fived.

An outside observer would probably have thought us crazy.