Heh... SPOM!  ROFLMAO!  I got a real live picture of the baptizing a cat thing... and it's an accurate portrayal.  I'm definitely going to use than analogy in the future. 😀 

And I totally agree.  While having a decent amount of RAM and headroom on the disks (physical or SSD) may not be the ultimate solution to performance problems, it DOES make life a whole lot easier.  A great example of that is it allows me to rebuild a 500GB Clustered Index without blowing out the MDF file because I asked for and got a 1TB "DBA work disk" (which will NEVER contain anything permanent).  Very justifiably, I knew that they were going to want to know how I was going to use it and what the ROI was going to be in some detail but I provided that without being asked.  That's the key for most people in charge of the purse strings.  They don't want to hear empty/non descript garbage about "Best Practices", etc.  They want something in writing that explains the benefit to the company both in the short term and, especially, in the long term even if they may not understand the nitty-gritty technical stuff.  It also helps if you can "bring it down to their level of understanding" without it making is sound like you're belittling their possible lack of knowledge on the given subject.  There is a bit of an art in making such requests palatable and well thought out because a lot of people think that IT people just want to live up to "He who dies with the most toys wins" attitude that so many people to put up without providing and adequate ROI.