Stage IV – Depression

“There’s no such thing as a clean terminal.”

This is where the brave façade cracks. You finally stop pretending. You open the BOM, not just glance at it, not just sort it by price or vendor code, you really look. Line by line. It’s a slow-motion horror film, a parade of obscure part numbers and country codes that read like the itinerary of a logistics nightmare. You thought the “important” stuff was safe, the radios, the modems, the SoCs you made those bold slide decks about. But no, it’s the quiet ones. The glue. The passive-aggressive components holding your dreams together.