The Lab’s gone quiet tonight. Just me, a dead desktop, and the taste of old regret. Turns out, every shortcut comes with a bill — and this time, I paid in time I can’t get back.

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NO CHEAP SHIT.
That’s my one rule in the Lab — the hill I’ll die on — and the one I just broke.

The glow of the screen paints my hands in soft blue light. LibreOffice hums open, and for a second it’s like stepping through time. The last time I used this suite, it was still called OpenOffice — back when nobody could afford Microsoft, and we were all running on hope and cracked CDs. I remember the word-processor wars: Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Microsoft Word. That was the golden age of making do, when half the job was convincing old machines not to die mid-save.

I’ve been thinking about all that because today I pulled a machine out of rotation. She’s sitting on the shelf now, waiting to be stripped for parts — fans still warm, power light still pulsing like a heartbeat. She’s only a few years old, but she never earned her keep. Truth is, I knew better the day I bought her.

I broke my own rule.

See, when it comes to my Lab, I don’t buy cheap — I buy right. I wait. I build machines meant to last longer than the mood I’m in. Every four or five years, I rebuild. Every eight, I start from scratch. Even the retired ones still hum like old blues records — tired but proud. One of my boys calls dibs early every cycle. Says, “Your shit be like new.”

But this one? I knew she was weak from the start. My editor warned me, and I said the four dumbest words in my vocabulary: “It’ll get me by.” She sighed — that kind of sigh that comes from knowing a man who refuses to learn the easy way. My late wife used to give me the same look.

She’d drag me through electronics aisles, make me put back laptops like they were bad decisions with price tags. “You don’t buy tools,” she’d say. “You buy time.” And she was right.

Cutting corners never saves you anything — not in money, not in effort, not in peace. It just delays the reckoning.

That off-the-rack desktop was only the second prebuilt I’d owned in forty years. First night I had it, I was already cussing under my breath. Adobe CC lagged, the fan howled, and I called tech support just to have someone to blame. Yeah — I was that guy.

Now here I am, working on a ten-year-old laptop running Linux, and she’s humming like a jazz trio at midnight. Ten years old and still moving smooth because I built her right, upgraded her right, respected her limits. Forty-eight hours into a fresh burn-in and not a single stutter.

So here’s what I believe everyone should know: don’t cut corners.
Not on your machines. Not on your craft. Not on your life.

The easy route always comes back around to collect its fee.
Because the hardest thing you’ll ever have to do in life — is the right thing.
And doing the right thing almost always takes longer, costs more, and hurts like hell in the moment.

But it lasts.

Nothing worth a damn comes easy.

Buy the right tools. Take the time to build things that endure.
Because when you cheat the process, you’re not saving time — you’re stealing it from your future self.

And time’s the only thing the Lab can’t rebuild.