I Am Operational Cost

... which is evidently something to be minimized that never actually generates any business value. This strikes me as strange -- not so much because that's not what I've been doing for the past according to the people who like what I've been doing, but rather because the people who like what I'm doing are the ones who have the (virtual) dollars and get credited with the business value from the tools that I build for them according to our negotiated specifications.

The bizarre net result is that I Am Operational Cost and need to be minimized, and the money that my business partners might want to spend on me to increase their business value will instead be spent on contractors that cost substantially more than I do while my job is threatened to avoid spending the money of the soulless Fortune 100 corporation to which I am not contributing business value because... I Am Operational Cost.

And to think that I thought I was an application developer that dabbles in analyst work.