The $5 Hero We Ignore Until Disaster Strikes

Behold the ULTIMATE networking protocol fantasy! Child asks for a dragon, Santa says "be realistic." Then the kid asks for an MSRP 5090 router (which doesn't exist yet) and SUDDENLY Santa's like "what color dragon do you want?" 💀 Getting your hands on next-gen networking equipment is apparently HARDER THAN ACQUIRING A MYTHICAL FIRE-BREATHING BEAST! The absolute state of tech supply chains has Santa reaching for his magical dragon-summoning powers instead of dealing with backorders and scalpers!

Ah, the eternal CS vs. Engineering rivalry. Patrick thinks he's found the perfect burn—CS majors are just programmers who run screaming at the mention of actual hardware. Meanwhile, the CS major is having an existential crisis at the mere utterance of "circuits" and "CPUs." As someone who once spent three hours debugging code only to realize my monitor wasn't plugged in properly, I feel personally attacked. Hardware is just software you can't Ctrl+Z when you break it.

When someone's amazed by your technical wizardry but all you did was spend 15 years of your life staring at a keyboard with a trackpoint nub. Those little red nipples between the G and H keys have taught me more than any CS degree ever could. The silent badge of honor for those who've typed their fingers to the bone in the trenches of ThinkPad warfare.

Turns out ChatGPT can't actually put on a hard hat and operate a crane. Who knew? Construction workers watching tech bros panic about AI replacing jobs are just sipping coffee and waiting for someone to fix the actual physical world when it breaks. Sure, AI can write your for-loops, but try asking it to install plumbing that doesn't flood your server room. Some jobs require calluses that silicon can't grow.

The mythical moment has arrived! After years of being asked "but can it run Crysis?" as the ultimate PC benchmark question, someone finally leveraged this meme into an actual job offer. Crysis (2007) was so notoriously demanding that even modern systems struggle with it at max settings. The formal frog gentleman's announcement perfectly captures that surreal professional victory when your obscure gaming knowledge suddenly becomes a legitimate technical qualification. The interview probably went: "What's your experience with hardware stress testing?" "Well, I've been running Crysis since 2007..." "YOU'RE HIRED!"

That's the Portal cake logo with "The MSRP is a lie" repeated like a dystopian mantra. Graphics card prices haven't been this fictional since cryptocurrency miners were building rigs in their mothers' basements. Manufacturers slap on MSRPs that belong in fantasy novels while retailers mark them up to "market value" – which is corporate speak for "whatever desperate gamers will pay." Nothing says "modern computing" like needing a second mortgage for a GPU that'll be obsolete before you finish paying it off.