The Sacred Vow of a Tech Hoarder: Never Throw Away a Cable
Description
A vibrant comic illustration by artists Yehuda and Maya Devir from their 'One of Those Days' series. In the foreground, a muscular man with a dark beard and mustache has a look of sheer terror and defiance on his face, shouting 'NEVER!!' from a large, red, comic-style speech bubble. He is protectively and desperately clutching a small cardboard box that is overflowing with a ridiculously large and tangled mess of various electronic cables - USB, power adapters, audio/video cords of multiple colors. In the background, a woman with long dark hair and a red and white shirt smiles cheekily as she presents an empty trash can, clearly wanting him to throw the cable collection away. The scene is a humorous depiction of the conflict between decluttering and the ingrained habit of tech professionals to keep every single cable they've ever owned. The technical context is the deeply relatable experience for developers and IT staff of hoarding old hardware components under the justification that they 'might need it someday.' This is especially true for senior staff who have worked with numerous generations of technology and know the pain of needing a specific, obsolete adapter for a critical task. It's a visual metaphor for technical debt, but with hardware
Comments
16Comment deleted
That box isn't clutter; it's a strategic reserve of legacy interconnects. You laugh now, but wait until you need to pull data off a 20-year-old IDE drive using a USB-to-PATA adapter you can't buy anymore
Throw out my cable ball? That’s the entire DR plan for the day the last Solaris box reminds us its only interface is “9600-8-N-1” over a DB9
After 20 years in tech, I've mastered distributed systems, scaled to billions of requests, and debugged kernel panics... but ask me to find the right USB cable in my drawer and watch my entire engineering confidence crumble faster than a MongoDB cluster without proper sharding
Every senior engineer knows that cable management is just premature optimization - that rat's nest is actually a perfectly functional distributed system where each cable has organically discovered its optimal routing path through years of evolutionary pressure. Touch nothing, for you know not which USB-C cable is load-bearing for the entire infrastructure
It’s not hoarding - it’s my low‑latency, multi‑vendor rollback plan for when prod’s only console port is RS-232 at 2 a.m
That “random cables” bin isn’t clutter; it’s our backward-compatibility layer - somewhere in that spaghetti is the dongle chain that keeps the 2010 payroll daemon talking to prod. Cleanup policy: never
'NEVER refactor!' - the sacred oath of every 20-YoE engineer with a monolith wired by vibes and vendor lock-in
Engineers: let's make endpoints different so they will be incompatible with plugs that serve for other purposes. People won't be able to mess up People: let's make adapters for each n every endpoint so will be able to connect microphone and fridge Comment deleted
Also engineers: let's create a universal serial bus with a smart protocol that allows connecting anything. Let's add many different extensions so you have to solve a riddle in order to understand if a specific phone can charge quickly on a specific power adapter by a specific cable. Comment deleted
Also engineers lawyers and patent trolls Comment deleted
EU: tYPe ⭐C⭐ Comment deleted
This is me fr Comment deleted
btw, I'm expecting type C keyhole from EU Comment deleted
I literally have that box. Except it's 4 boxes sorted by type. Comment deleted
Literally me Comment deleted
That box(or, for me, bag) smelled, idk, just it was like that smell from my childhood Comment deleted