[sethammons]

A man approached a street artist making amazing paintings and asked for one. About 2 minutes later, the artwork completed, and the artist asked for the fee. The man balked at the price. "What!? This only took a couple of minutes!" "No," replied the artist, "this took me my whole life."

[CSSer]

Also see the parable of the plumber and the water heater: http://www.readersadvice.com/mmeade/musings/plumber.html

[willcipriano]

A real life version of that, that is closer to software dev in my opinon.

I knew a plumber who was called out on Christmas Eve to deal with a clogged toilet. He arrives at the place and it's a beautiful mansion, full of well dressed guests eating wine and cheese. He goes into the bathroom and begins to resolve the issue when the homeowner comes over to dispute his price, "$500 for 15 minutes of work, how can you justify that?", the plumber reaches into the toilet grabs a handful of the contents and squeezes them between his fingers "Because I am willing to do this". The homeowner ran away disgusted, his bill was paid in full.

Writing software for bureaucratic organizations loaded with non-technical management sucks. We get paid what we do because nobody else wants to do it.