The executive team finally approved a $300K budget for a company-wide hardware refresh. The staff has been complaining for 3 years that their machines take 15 minutes to open a PDF. I was supposed to purchase 150 brand new laptops. I didn't do that. I went to a government surplus auction and bought 150 refurbished laptops from 2016 for $40K. They are thick, grey, and weigh about 8 pounds each. They look like they were designed to survive a nuclear winter. I took the remaining $260K and purchased high-end graphics cards, liquid cooling systems, and specialized motherboards. I used company funds to build an absolute monster of a computing cluster in my basement. I told accounting the components were for a hyper-converged failover network. I'm actually using it to run an open-source AI model that predicts AA baseball statistics for sports betting. When I distributed the heavy grey laptops to the staff, there was an immediate uproar. The Director of Sales came to my office and slammed his 8-pound laptop on my desk. He asked why I bought hardware that looks like it belongs on a submarine. I leaned back in my chair and sighed. I told him we're transitioning to a physical zero-trust architecture. I explained that modern slim laptops lack the necessary internal shielding to block ambient corporate espionage. I said these specific chassis are lined with a proprietary zinc alloy that prevents unauthorized Bluetooth siphoning. He asked why it takes 12 minutes to boot up. I told him it takes 12 minutes because the BIOS is running a military-grade cryptographic handshake with our cloud perimeter. He immediately backed down and apologized for questioning the encryption process. The entire company is now hauling around 8-pound concrete blocks. Meanwhile, my basement supercomputer successfully predicted 14 consecutive winning picks yesterday. I made $4K by 3 PM. The hardware refresh was a total success.