Been there so many times it hurts. Last month I yanked a GPU, reseated every stick of RAM, and ran memtest twice on a machine that was just booting to a black screen because one end of the SATA power was half out. The worst part is the customer watched me do the whole song and dance and I had to act like the cable check was all part of my master plan. Now I force myself to wiggle every cable first, even when it feels dumb, because it saves me from eating crow later. The deep dive still teaches you stuff though, you learn the board layout and what weird noises mean. But man, 3 hours is rough.

What was the joke though? Six years on the job and nobody even knew what he said, so are we supposed to just accept that any old post can end your career with no chance to explain? That part is what gets me, not whether a boss can fire someone, but whether the rest of us even get to know what line we crossed.