If It Works, Don't Touch It

THE AUDACITY! Someone labeled an Ethernet port tab as "Protective Boot"?! I'm having an existential crisis right now. For YEARS I've been yanking these little plastic tabs off network cables thinking they were just annoying packaging leftovers! Turns out they're ACTUALLY serving a purpose?! My entire networking life has been a LIE. Next you'll tell me those silica gel packets aren't just forbidden snacks! 💀

The IT paradox in its purest form. When you spend your days fixing security vulnerabilities and battling IoT nightmares, the last thing you want is your toaster conspiring with your fridge to lock you out of your own home. That OpenWRT router isn't just a preference—it's a defensive perimeter. Meanwhile, the tech enthusiasts are living in their voice-controlled utopia, blissfully unaware they're one firmware update away from their house becoming self-aware. And that 2004 printer? Pure psychological warfare. After 15 years of random paper jams and cryptic error messages, you develop a relationship that's half Stockholm syndrome, half mutual assured destruction.

Someone asks why IT people are jerks, and gets the perfect response: an IT guy drove TWO HOURS just to push a power button that three people swore was already on. Trust issues? Justified. The first rule of tech support isn't "have you tried turning it off and on again" – it's "are you SURE it's actually on?" Four years of computer science education reduced to playing glorified electrician because users can't differentiate between a power light and their imagination.

The fearless cloud engineer, who boldly proclaims "I fear no man"... until SSH enters the chat. That moment when your terminal connection drops mid-deployment and your heart skips three beats. Infrastructure as Code? Nah, we're running Infrastructure as Prayer hoping the connection stays alive. Nothing quite matches the primal terror of watching your SSH session hang while you're elbow-deep in production configs at 2PM on a Friday.

Nothing says "I've reached peak adulthood" quite like defending your janky home server setup from judgment. That little black box running your Plex media server, personal cloud, and three different abandoned side projects is basically your digital child now. The corporate IT folks might have their fancy racks and redundant cooling systems, but your repurposed desktop sitting on a doily with blinking lights is hosting your entire digital life on a residential internet connection with a dynamic IP address. And you'll defend it to your dying breath. Sure, it crashes every time there's a power flicker and your uptime is measured in "since the last thunderstorm," but it's yours , dammit!

When your security system flags your own home network as "suspicious." The IP address 192.168.240.1 is a private IP address that can only be accessed from within your local network—literally your own devices. It's like getting a text from your spouse asking who that stranger in your bed is... while they're lying next to you. The real security threat is apparently the security system itself.