Farewells Are Always Sad

When they said "tip your server," I don't think this is what they meant. That poor rack server just took a nosedive onto concrete, spilling its guts like a digital piñata. Years of carefully managed RAID configurations, backups, and production data scattered across the floor in seconds. Somewhere, a sysadmin is having the worst day of their career while the CTO is frantically checking if their resume is up to date. Hope they had off-site backups, because no amount of "have you tried turning it off and on again" is fixing this massacre.

That moment when someone learns you're in "computer science" and immediately assumes you're tech support. Sure, I can reverse a binary tree, implement a neural network, and debug race conditions, but no, I have absolutely no idea why your laptop makes that weird clicking sound. I mean, I could look at it, but that would set a dangerous precedent where I become everyone's personal Geek Squad. My algorithm for handling these requests is simple: blank stare, slight smirk, change subject.

FORGET PREGNANCY CRAVINGS! While some people crave pickles and ice cream, tech nerds have EVOLVED to crave the sweet, sweet silicon of a 5090 GPU! 💅 The absolute DRAMA of comparing hormonal cravings to the desperate NEED for 64GB of RAM is sending me to another dimension! It's not morning sickness, honey, it's the UNBEARABLE NAUSEA of having less than 8TB of SSD storage! The gender reveal party? It's just going to be me unboxing my white PC case while screaming "IT'S A GAMING RIG!"

The great GPU drowning of 2023! While the high-end RTX 5080 and 4090 giraffes stand tall in the deep end smugly claiming "Unreal Engine 5 is working smooth af," all the budget cards are desperately trying to keep their heads above water. That poor RTX 2060 is basically underwater at this point. Nothing quite captures the existential dread of trying to run modern game engines on aging hardware. Epic Games be like "minimum requirements: whatever card was released yesterday." Meanwhile, game devs are nodding sympathetically while secretly adding another particle system that'll bring your GPU to its knees.

Taking "Go & play outside" literally by dragging your entire gaming rig to a field is peak programmer malicious compliance. Technically correct—the best kind of correct! Sure, you're getting vitamin D, but you're still grinding that MMO while grasshoppers become your new debugging partners. The lengths we'll go to just to avoid touching grass in the metaphorical sense...

The cobbler's children have no shoes, and the programmer's house has no smart tech—just a demonic printer that might need to be put down at any moment. Nothing captures the duality of tech life better than this. Non-tech people building smart homes with IoT everything, while actual developers know better than to invite that chaos into their lives. We're too busy fixing bugs at work to come home and debug why our refrigerator is suddenly speaking Portuguese and ordering 50 gallons of milk. And that printer? The universal enemy. The one piece of technology that has somehow escaped decades of innovation and remains stubbornly, maliciously stupid. It senses fear and feeds on desperation. It requires blood sacrifice to print a simple PDF.