Writing this now, I realise that there is an corner case I hadn't covered in this plan. Solving it is left as an exercise to the reader, but I'd suggest something along the lines of "Emacs or vi?"
Should I just quit and start a company selling shit because that'll look better to everyone else?
I do get your point though, and I do wish sometimes I worked on something that wouldn't exist without me.
Why not say something like "I make computers go harder, better, faster, stronger?" Funny, doesn't make you sound like you're apologizing for what you do, and if someone's really interested ("how does that work?") you can follow up with an explanation. I'd try for some metaphors, too, like "Servers/computers are always juggling tasks, and what I do gives them more arms to juggle with."
I know your last question was rhetorical but if you start doing something that makes you unhappy just to find a partner then you will have a partner who loves you when you're unhappy. Not a great idea.
Also, women who aren't fascinated by computer simply do not care enough to bother trying to explain things via metaphor. I have a friend who was asked at a party "What do you do?" He replied "I'm an engineer working on--" and before he finished his sentence, she stood up and walked away. FYI, he's the suavest person I know and is _extremely_ successful with women, usually: he's learned to stop trying to explain or even mention his job at all.
I recommend you don't try giving people advice on approaching women and what to say until you've _tried it_ for a few years, which as a presumably-straight women I doubt you've done.
You'll note the pointed absence of "I am a poor peon working in the Ruby on Rails salt mines." (And heck, even when I was a Japanese salaryman, I got better results with "I am in charge of administration of X university's admissions exam" rather than "I write unit tests and XML files, please tune out of this conversation.")