Some of you like my stories or at least, so I'm told so I will relate the one of my PC, which will be getting replaced tomorrow, forever.

The year was 2010, I'd graduated from University - and that was about the only good thing that happened. My mother was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, my girlfriend of 2 years - who I had been living with for some time - left me and moved to the opposite side of the planet, I was working in a job I hated, and which eventually did me great bodily harm from which I have only recently, finally, recovered, and to add to all that, I drank a *ton*.

The only other bright spot was I'd made some great friends on SourceOP 24/7 Goldrush, and we'd resolved to get into this comp tf2 stuff for real this time. But my computer then (an HP I'd bought at best buy in 2005) was simply not going to cut it. So, I'd heard, if you wanted some real shit; some *real* gaming computer, you had to do it yourself. So, naturally, to be a good gamer, one had to fork out the money and learn some skills.

I spent roughly $1,500 on the computer, all the latest and greatest stuff that seemed reasonable to pay for, and a few extra frills that were totally pointless excesses. I named it Doris.

The trouble started the day I got home from work and found all of it lying on the floor of my garage. I set to putting the MOBO into the case, a massive full tower ATX case, complete with open side, a massive fan occupying most of it, and *all* steel construction - no plastic for me. As it turned out, there had been a mistake the day it was made at the factory, and whatever press responsible for drilling out the holes for the motherboard were slightly off - only 2 of the 8 screws lined up properly. I checked my order just to make sure I wasn't an idiot that had ordered a board that didn't fit the case, and indeed, nothing was wrong there.

I e-mailed the company and got a response fully in what I'll assume was some variation of Chinese. I gave up hope that they'd respond in a language that I could read. So, I decided, screw it, I'll just put 2 screws in the thing, and I'll get around to fixing it later. I never did. The company died about 7 months later perhaps I was not the only one.

Then after more assembly, it came time for the GPU. I'd been into PC gaming for a while so I knew my way around GPUs. I'd even bought the last ever AGP card for 256$ the day it came out - you even had to plug it into your HDD to get it to power on. But this thing, was a 1gig card, a number that then seemed astronomical. I'd used a 32mb Geforce 2 for AGES as a kid, and the idea of 1gig was just absurdity. The card was gigantic, and it did not fit into the back panels, so I had to go to the hardware store, buy tin snips, and cut the back of my case off. It still didn't fit into the back of the case. So I took a pair of pliers and bent the big honkin' metal mounting plate on the GPU. Warranty now almost certainly voided; but at least it fit.

Myself and that computer played TF2 virtually nonstop for the next 4 years, met just about everybody there was to meet in comp tf2 at the time, and then I got into casting and doing my youtube channel. But father time is undefeated, and my escape was starting to wear down. The fans on the GPU were starting to seize up. OK, I said, I know how to oil a damn fan. Nope, in this brave new world, Gigabyte saw fit to make that impossible. Replacements cost 12$ a piece. 24$ for new fans, when it should be free to drop some oil in there. Nope, it was then I decided that I was going to drill my own stupid holes. So armed with a rather sharp drill bit, I just pressed down on the middle of the fan and slowly burrowed a hole into the fans, into which I poured some nice knitting machine oil. I covered my holes with scotch tape, and went about my business. From then on, for the last 3 years, I've been occasionally pulling the card to add additional knitting machine oil to its fans to keep them from seizing. So far, great success.

But now components are starting to slowly die. I've had to oil all the case fans, the CPU cooler, and the DVDdrive (cannibalized from the 2005 HP) no longer functions. When I get into windows I have to wait 45 seconds before the computer will accept input. It was time for a new computer. I actually asked for advice this time, and our resident hardware guru Setsui set me on the right path and prevented me from making the same mistakes over again.

So, while I may be in a much, much better place now, I'll always fondly remember Doris the monstrosity, and all of the highs and lows that it brought me. From playing in the first and only season of main, overseeing massive growth in the UGC 6s community, playing on a team with one of my favorite players from before I started playing, introduced my son to heavy, and he independently discovered MGE, and became a rager, and the death of SourceOP. Not to mention winning UGC platinum in my first season, and lording over the BIG GOLDRUSH LEAGUE for multiple seasons! Or casting the last (probably ever) ESEA GPIT match, the last (maybe ever?) ESEA LAN, and getting to cast with virtually every well known caster from TF2 history excepting DJC and Leogeo. It wasn't a terrible use of 7 years.

But now I have think of a new name for Doris' replacement....