Lol yep sounds a lot like my process! Took time to get it down and settle on tools (though those always changed anyway) but once you did, could make a buncha money for sure. With KVMs I could do a lotta volume on those kinda jobs and get some of my engineering homework done in between. Hardware repairs were more fun but way more time consuming and hit or miss depending on overall condition.

Not a bad gig overall but certainly did come with some downsides. Like, desktop computer filled with insect carcasses, brown everywhere with tar from cigarette smoke, stinking up the shop, customer somehow oblivious to the gnar-bomb that is their daily life intersecting with “ordinary” society.

Definitely not wrong! Especially once you’ve dialed in your routine of anti-malware utilities to run on pretty much everything. It’s like an antibiotic cocktail, lol. Or did you prefer the “back up and nuke on sight” approach?

Yep, I did similar around the time. Can’t blame people for being mad that the thing they bought is damn near unusable (and was destined to be, but they didn’t understand that part). If someone buys a new bike, even if it’s cheap, it shouldn’t roll like you’re on gravel after a couple weeks and become impossible to pedal within months. But damn, there were a lot of horrible machines sold in those days.

And then of course, the least fun part of that era, the guys who would bring their machines back weekly despite very stern warnings to stop visiting “those sites”.

That graphic in the second link, holy shit

I like it, very succinct way to get the point across.

That’s the way these things have always gone and probably always will. Retarded, imbecile, idiot, these were all effectively clinical terms (or whatever best approximated clinical practice in their eras) - they didn’t hold an insulting intention initially. People co-opted the terms to make fun of each other, as we do, and so professionals had to shift the clinical vocabulary so they weren’t using commonly hurled insults when discussing patients. And that means new words people can use to make fun of each other, yay! Which of course they did, necessitating another rotation. Pretty hilarious if you ask me.

The most recent example in my own life - my wife is in her mid 30s, and is pregnant - some medical professionals call this a “geriatric pregnancy”! But because some folks are getting offended by that term, they’re starting to use “advanced maternal age pregnancy”. Bit of a mouthful, I think they’ll get to keep that one.

Anyway. Carlin had a great bit on this phenomena, he’s the one who pointed it out to me.