The years went by and new machines continued to appear. I watched everyone else pick up their new Pentium 2 computers, and while they were smiling on the outside, I smiled on the inside. Patiently I would continue to wait, because those too would become worthless in a blink of an eye. Yes, I was right again. The Pentium 3 swooped in and turned the Pentium 2’s into landfill. The P3 seemed like a marvel in technology, but I wasn’t to be fooled. I had seen this pattern all too many times before. Lurking in the shadows was a faster machine, with greater bus speeds, bigger caches, and enormous super-mega-gigabyte drives. I didn't own a computer, but who was the smarter one?

I could wait some more. I could be more patient than the wolf spider I had read about in a book. No sir, I wouldn't be wasting my evenings surfing the Interweb, listening to music, or learning how to use Photoshop, not when my machine would barely be able to keep up.

Had I bought that P3, I would have surely been the fool, because the Pentium 4 had already arrived. My brother scoffs at me for being too cautious, too thrifty, too prudent. But he is the fool you see! He is the whetstone that grinds himself against the cutting-edge. For since 1988, he has been buying a brand new machine every two years, pouring thousands of dollars into hardware that becomes worthless faster than politician's promise.

All those countless hours he has spent playing games, learning programming languages, reading, writing, and mastering software applications could have been put to better use. Oh sure, I only have a Hotmail address that I access from a terminal at the public library, and I work in a dead-end job writing ad copy on an IBM Selectric, while by brother thrives in a tech-savvy industry. But who's the wiser one?

No I have never played Doom, or Quake, or Everquest, and no, I don't know the difference between hot-swapping and wife-swapping, but the money I have saved by not ever purchasing a computer has helped me get almost slightly closer to becoming rich as he has spent becoming enriched. Maybe I'll buy a computer next year because Moore's Law can't fight me forever.

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