Flush Mounted Engineering

The instant someone discovers you work with computers, their brain immediately jumps to "tech support wizard who can fix anything with a power button." The selective hearing kicks in - they start the question, you're already mentally disconnecting. Ten years of building complex systems and mastering three programming languages, but Aunt Karen still thinks your primary skill is resurrecting her 2007 inkjet printer that's been possessed by demons since Windows Vista. The modern programmer's defense mechanism: develop the ability to tune out any sentence that begins with "Hey, so you study computers right? Can you fix my-"

The EXISTENTIAL CRISIS of staring at two buttons labeled "Ray Tracing" and "Path Tracing" and having ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE what unholy difference exists between them! 💦 Meanwhile, your GPU is SCREAMING in the background as you toggle between settings that might as well be labeled "Make Computer Hot" and "Make Computer SLIGHTLY HOTTER." The audacity of game developers to assume we know what these rendering techniques do beyond "pretty graphics go brrr" is just... *chef's kiss* MAGNIFICENT.

The eternal struggle of chasing hardware upgrades! While everyone's hyping 8K resolution, some of us are still running the same potato hardware since the Clinton administration. It's like Moore's Law meets financial reality—your GPU budget is inversely proportional to your rent payments. That graphics card you're eyeing costs more than your first car, but hey, those extra pixels in Minecraft are totally worth it. Meanwhile your IDE still lags when you type too fast.

The eternal toxic relationship between gamers and their GPUs. Left side: A stoic gamer professing love to his graphics card, only to be brutally rejected. Right side: The NVIDIA GTX 1080 begging for sweet release after being pushed to render yet another poorly optimized AAA title at max settings. That GPU is literally screaming "I was designed for Minecraft, not whatever ray-traced monstrosity you're trying to run at 4K." Meanwhile, the gamer keeps whispering "just one more frame" as the cooling fans hit jet engine decibels.

Found the bug in your system! That's not a CPU cache, it's a CAT-che. Your computer isn't booting because someone installed a feline firewall in your drive bay. Technically speaking, this is what we call a "purr-allel processing unit" - great at napping, terrible at computing. The 520W power supply is now dedicated to warming one very comfortable kitty who's hijacked your hardware. Have you tried turning it off and petting it again?

The embedded systems world is having a full-blown affair with C/C++ while giving Rust the cold shoulder. Despite Rust's memory safety guarantees and zero-cost abstractions, embedded devs keep crawling back to their toxic exes C and C++. It's like watching someone choose dial-up when fiber is available because "we've always done it this way." The embedded community's relationship status with C/C++ is definitely: "It's complicated" – and by complicated, I mean "refusing to move on despite all the segfaults and buffer overflows."