A hilarious look at the age-old dev habit of hoarding cables and hardware parts. Why your spouse hates it, but your homelab absolutely needs it.
If you live with a partner, you've definitely heard this phrase: "Can we please throw out this box of tangled cables? It's taking up half the closet!" Don't cave, guys. The pure dopamine hit when you fish out a decade-old, highly specific cable to save your homelab is better than passing a senior tech interview.
Scrolling through Reddit's r/homelab, I found a post that perfectly captures this universal tech truth. Some guy was gloating about finding a very weird, proprietary-looking cable (a USB to RJ50 cable for an APC UPS, to be exact).
Normally, when you set up a UPS, you toss this cable in a drawer and forget it exists. But when the battery dies and you need to plug into the PC to check logs, you're screwed without it. The OP proudly stated: "There was 100% chance that I would need this eventually." The real flex here isn't just keeping the cable—it’s actually finding it when the time comes. Absolute victory.
The comments section turned into a support group for IT hoarders, sharing some wildly impressive MacGyver-level fixes:
Look, keeping old screws, CAT5 cables, and weird adapters isn't crazy. In a field where things break at 2 AM, having the right physical hardware on hand can save you hours of downtime waiting for Amazon delivery.
But let's be real—hoarding requires a bit of brainpower. If you just throw everything into a cardboard box of despair, you're never going to find what you need, and it's practically garbage anyway. Do yourself a favor: buy some plastic organizer bins. Label your stuff. It keeps the house looking clean (happy wife, happy life) and makes you look like a wizard when you pull off a hardware hotfix in 5 minutes flat.
