The Ultimate Waste Of Computing Power

The four horsemen of the apocalypse: World of Warcraft, beige computer tower, Mountain Dew, and pepperoni pizza. Back when your biggest worry was whether your guild would show up for the raid, not whether your Docker container would deploy correctly. The "work from home" setup before it was mandatory – except you weren't working, you were grinding for epic gear while your parents yelled about the phone line being tied up. Twenty years later and I'm still staring at screens, drinking caffeine, and eating delivery food... just with better resolution and more expensive hardware.

When your boss says they hired a "technical expert" to fix your slow computer. Sure enough, here's the "RAM upgrade" in progress – a cat literally trying to get inside the PC case. Bet they're charging you $200/hour for this "specialized service." Next up: the cat will chase the mouse cursor and call it "pointer optimization."

Remember when games fit on a 1.44MB floppy? Now Call of Duty is like that friend who keeps saying "just one more beer" but shows up to your house with a U-Haul full of storage requirements. At 105GB, SpongeBob thinks the madness has peaked, but Patrick knows better - slapping us with a 300GB reality check. Your SSD isn't crying, it's having a full-on existential crisis. And game developers are just sitting there like "What? It's just 4K textures of the same gun from 37 slightly different angles."

First comment: "HDDs degrade brutally over time. The easiest way to make a computer feel like new is to get a new SSD." Second comment: "My 60k hours 7200 WD Blue HDD wants a word with you" Third comment: "Let me know when it finds those words." The third comment is pure murder—it's implying the HDD is so slow that it's still searching for the words to say! Even a 7200 RPM Western Digital drive with 60,000 hours of faithful service can't escape the brutal truth: while it's desperately spinning its platters to find a comeback, the SSD gang is already three file transfers ahead. It's like watching your grandpa try to remember a story while the kids have already moved on to TikTok.

The eternal tech caste system in one image. On the left, your product manager flexing with a $4000 MacBook Pro they use exclusively for Outlook and Slack. On the right, the developer who actually builds your entire product, running a battle-scarred ThinkPad they rescued from an e-waste bin and upgraded with Linux. The ThinkPad is held together with electrical tape and spite, but somehow compiles code faster than the PM's machine. The real irony? The developer could afford the MacBook but actively chose not to buy it.

THE ETERNAL STRUGGLE OF EVERY DEVELOPER WHO SWORE THEY WOULDN'T BUY ANOTHER GADGET THIS YEAR! That Steam Deck with its measly 20% discount is TAUNTING me from across the internet, whispering sweet nothings about all the games I could play during compile time. My bank account is SCREAMING in terror while my inner child is already imagining playing Doom during standups. The mental gymnastics I'm performing to justify this "investment" deserves an Olympic medal. "It's practically saving money if you think about it!" 💸