At the end of the day, either on the subway or over FaceTime, my girlfriend will ask me what I did at work that day. I immediately feel sorry for her because, unfortunately, I’m going to tell her.

Do you know what the reg symbol is? It’s this: ®. In HTML, it’s this: ®. Pronounced with a soft G as in “registered trademark symbol,” it is the bane of my development existence.

Part of my job is coding marketing emails. It’s not exciting and it’s certainly not cutting edge work. In order to code emails, I use what I like to call 1998 HTML. I learned to code HTML in 1999 and we used to use <table> tags to lay out web pages, which isn’t, as they say, semantically correct. Since then, there have been many developments in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

All of those developments are useless in coding emails. You have to code badly to make sure it looks good in every single possible combination of operating system and program or browser. And every possible combination has its own quirks that you have to account for.

And they all display the goddamned reg symbol differently.

So, for example, I have to code an email my drug Pentalax® that will cure your constipation or my SSRI Pentazil® and both need to have a registered trademark symbol whenever they are mentioned. When I talk about Pentalax® and Pentazil®, Outlook for Windows 8 will display the reg symbol a little too high and Gmail on a Mac displays it a little too low*. So, I have to spend all day trying to get them to display consistently. It takes hours.

And that’s my day. I made incremental changes to email HTML and I sent it to a thing called Email on Acid to check all of the different ways that it displays. This is what I do for a living. Emails aren’t sexy but they’re my bread and butter.

For the record, I’m thankful for my job and the people that I work with (and I’m not just saying that in case any of them happen to find this post*).