The POWER OF UNIX:

Fantasy- Everything works.

Realistic Fantasy- Your cousin brings home his snow iBook G3/DVD. Somehow it shat itself when he put it into sleep mode, and now every boot brings it only to the point of loading the menubar applets (volume, etc)- Finder and the Dock are fucked. However, with THE POWER OF UNIX at hand, you simply boot to a single-user shell, mount the X install CD, do a quick Google for the appropriate fix, and you're back in business.

Reality- The iBook's hosed. You drop to a shell, and spend three hours trying to figure out why there's no entry for the optical drive in /dev. You crawl OpenProjects.net for anyone with half a clue about Darwin, and get laughed at for working from the command line. Users call you a reactionary, even after you explain that THE FUCKING FINDER WON'T LOAD THERE IS NO GUI. The only fixes you find are on Geocities pages and Apple's knowledgebase, and neither work. You wind up reinstalling both 9 and X (nondestructively), and the problem remains. The one Darwin guru you do find suggests attaching the $500 Firewire drive you don't have, performing a backup, and doing a full reformat. Nobody has any goddamn clue why you don't get a disk1 entry in /dev, and assume you're a moron who can't ls.

Jesus Christ. Computers suck.