Missed Marketing Opportunity

The eternal struggle of every IT professional at electronics stores. That moment when the Best Buy employee innocently asks "Do you need help?" and your brain immediately switches to superiority mode. You've spent the last decade debugging kernel panics and configuring RAID arrays—of course you know the difference between HDMI 2.0 and 2.1! You didn't spend four years getting a CS degree to be asked if you've tried turning it off and on again. The internal monologue is deafening: "I could probably fix their POS system faster than they could sell me this overpriced HDMI cable." Yet we still go there... every... single... time.

Console gamers sobbing because they can't play a 20-year-old title without paying for yet another remaster, while PC gamers casually run ancient games on cutting-edge hardware like it's no big deal. The true irony? Console makers talk about "ecosystem" while Steam is over here actually preserving gaming history. Your $3000 graphics card running Morrowind at 400 FPS with mods is peak gaming culture.

Ah, NVIDIA's market strategy in a nutshell. Become absurdly wealthy selling GPUs that cost more than my car, then act shocked when developers complain about memory limitations. It's like a billionaire asking why you don't just buy a bigger house when you complain about storage space. "What's that? Your AI model doesn't fit in 8GB VRAM? Have you considered remortgaging your home for our $4000 model instead?" Meanwhile, developers everywhere are writing increasingly creative memory optimization hacks just to avoid selling a kidney for more VRAM. The tech equivalent of fitting an elephant into a Mini Cooper.

The gaming industry in a nutshell: Cyberpunk 2077, a game from 2020 with futuristic graphics that would make your bank account cry, running at a buttery 100 FPS with an RTX 5090 (a GPU that probably costs more than your car). Meanwhile, Borderlands 4, allegedly coming out in 2025, will somehow manage to look like it was rendered on a toaster from 2019 and still make your high-end rig struggle to hit 45 FPS. Game optimization is clearly an art form that some developers treat like abstract expressionism – nobody knows what the hell is going on, but we're all supposed to nod and pretend it makes sense.

The classic PC enthusiast pipeline: first you're all excited telling your friends how amazing custom PCs are, then you're offering to build one for them because "it's so easy," and finally—the inevitable trap—you're suddenly their personal IT department for life. Nothing says "I've made a terrible mistake" quite like getting a text at 11pm saying "my computer is making a weird noise" and knowing you'll spend your weekend troubleshooting a problem caused by 47 toolbars and a suspicious "free antivirus" download. The real cost of being the tech-savvy friend isn't measured in dollars—it's measured in family gatherings spent updating drivers.

Ah, the sticker that launched a thousand panic attacks. For the youngsters: computers used to store years as two digits to save precious memory. So 1999 was just "99" in code. When 2000 hit, systems would roll over to "00" and potentially think it was 1900, causing chaos with calculations, dates, and potentially launching nuclear missiles (or so the media claimed). The solution? Turn everything off and hope for the best. Spoiler alert: we survived, but Best Buy made a killing selling these stickers to terrified boomers who thought their toasters might become sentient.