He's Upgrading Your RAM

That moment when management expects you to build an enterprise-level application with 10,000 concurrent users on a 5-year-old Dell with 4GB of RAM. Nothing says "we believe in you" quite like assigning you to build the next AWS competitor on hardware that struggles to run Chrome and Slack simultaneously. I've seen toasters with more computing power.

Ah yes, the classic family tech support paradox. Tell your relatives you work with computers and suddenly you're expected to resurrect their 12-year-old printer that's been possessed by demons since Windows Vista. The real million-dollar question isn't which coding title sounds fanciest on LinkedIn – it's which one will make your aunt stop asking you to fix her router during Thanksgiving dinner. Spoiler alert: none of them work. You could select "Quantum Entanglement Specialist" and they'd still hand you their phone saying "it's doing that thing again."

The legendary ThinkPad's latest innovation: a completely black screen feature! Perfect for those moments when your code is so bad even your laptop refuses to display it. The iconic red TrackPoint is still there though, silently judging your life choices. It's not a bug, it's a feature called "Zen Mode" – helping developers face the void of their existence without distractions. Bonus: saves battery life like nothing else on the market!

Buy a new mechanical keyboard and suddenly TikTok's algorithm knows you've joined the cult. Next thing you know, you're sitting in a coffin surrounded by keyboard enthusiasts asking about your switch preferences while your bank account is already dead and buried. The real RIP is your wallet after you discover keycap group buys.

Previous generation at 23: "Let's buy a house and plan for our growing family!" Developers at 33: "If I save $100 a month, I might afford that GPU that'll be obsolete before I finish typing this sentence." Nothing says "I've made it" quite like calculating how many Cup Noodles you need to skip to afford hardware that'll run your poorly optimized code slightly faster. Financial planning at its finest!

The classic programmer dad joke in its natural habitat! Kid wanted a Nintendo Switch for Christmas, but dad—being the network engineer with dad humor—got him a network switch instead. That look of disappointment is the same face I make when management promises to refactor the legacy codebase but just adds another layer of abstraction. The kid's learning early that technical specifications matter, and ambiguity will get you 48 ports of Ethernet when you wanted Mario Kart.