Me and My Cat — Pleb Machine Live.

2026-08-25

When We Starve — Pleb Machine Live.

Hanging On Me and My Cat— Another Moral Story About Lack, Financial Hardship, Uncertainty, And The Struggle To Find Solid Ground.

There are moments in life when you realise that all your priorities have become beautifully, spectacularly confused.

Today, for example, I have a PlebMachine that is working.

Not “almost working.”

Not “it works if you stand on one leg, sacrifice a chicken, and reboot twice.”

It is working.

PlebMachine is live.

PlebWare is in perfect working order.

The wallpapers work.

The modes work.

Mission Control works.

PlebVox works.

The machine changes its environment, launches applications, behaves itself and generally does exactly what it was told to do.

Which is fantastic.

There is only one tiny problem.

I can’t eat it.

This afternoon I found myself sitting at the car wash, looking at the grand total of R67 in my possession and wondering what the hell I was going to do with it.

R67.

That is not really a budget.

That is a financial puzzle printed on a tiny piece of paper.

There are several contestants competing for the prize.

Cat food.

Data.

Something to eat.

Various necessities.

And, naturally, the unexpected little expenses that have a magical ability to appear whenever you have precisely R67.

The cat, meanwhile, has absolutely no interest in my financial planning.

The cat does not care that PlebMachine is live.

The cat does not care that PlebWare is functioning perfectly.

The cat does not care that I have spent hours writing code, fixing bugs, testing things, breaking things, fixing them again and finally getting the bloody machine to behave.

The cat has one requirement.

FOOD.

And frankly, the cat has a point.

I looked at those 67 rand and thought about all the clever things a person can build with almost nothing.

You can build software.

You can build websites.

You can build Linux systems.

You can build automation.

You can build an entire little ecosystem called PlebWare.

You can build PlebMachine.

You can build PlebVox.

You can spend hours arguing with a computer because a wallpaper refuses to change at exactly the right moment.

You can stare at a terminal and feel like a cybernetic wizard.

You can finally get everything working and announce:

PLEB MACHINE LIVE!

And then the cat looks at you.

“Wonderful.”

“Congratulations.”

“Very impressive.”

“Now feed me.”

That is when the great technological revolution comes crashing back down to Earth.

There is a certain comedy in being a software developer when you are also responsible for keeping a cat alive.

The computer accepts code.

The cat accepts tuna.

The computer accepts configuration files.

The cat accepts chicken.

The computer is perfectly happy when you say:

sudo apt install something

The cat is considerably less impressed.

You cannot open a terminal and type:

sudo apt install cat-food

Although, honestly, somebody should probably develop that.

Imagine the output:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done

cat-food is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed,
0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Then you look into the cupboard.

E: Package ‘cat-food’ has no installation candidate.

That is Linux realism.

And that is probably the funniest part of being alive when money is tight.

We still have to laugh.

Because people everywhere are struggling with the same ridiculous mathematics.

You look at your money.

You look at what you need.

You look at what you want.

You look at what the cat needs.

You look back at the money.

The money has not increased.

You perform the calculation again.

Still R67.

Apparently mathematics has decided to become personal.

So you laugh.

Then you figure it out.

Then you carry on.

Because sometimes the greatest achievement of the day isn’t making a fortune.

Sometimes it is simply getting through the day without losing your sense of humour.

And sometimes, if you’re very lucky, you get a working Linux machine out of it.

So here I am.

Me.

My cat.

R67.

A mobile office.

A mountain of things still to do.

And a PlebMachine that actually works.

There is something strangely satisfying about that.

Because the machine represents something bigger than just a computer.

It represents the idea that you can start with very little and still build something.

You can take an old machine.

You can take Linux.

You can take some scripts.

You can take a ridiculous amount of persistence.

You can throw in a few swear words for debugging purposes.

And eventually…

PlebMachine Live.

Perfect working order.

Now if somebody could just compile me some cat food, we’d be sorted.

For everybody out there who is struggling right now:

You’re not the only one.

Sometimes life looks like a six-panel comic.

Sometimes the punchline is your bank balance.

Sometimes the villain is the price of groceries.

Sometimes the hero is a cat who refuses to let you forget the important things.

And sometimes the little victory is simply this:

Something worked today.

Maybe it was your computer.

Maybe it was your car.

Maybe you got through a difficult conversation.

Maybe you managed to put food on the table.

Maybe you simply got out of bed and kept going.

Those little victories count.

So tonight, I shall continue building.

The cat shall continue supervising.

PlebMachine shall continue doing its thing.

And somehow, somewhere, we’ll figure out what to do with that R67.

Because apparently you can’t eat code.

But you can build with it.

And sometimes building something gives you just enough hope to carry on building tomorrow.

✍️ Othello Cody Verrocchio
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