Well dang, sounds like Dale cost you $70 and about 12 years of thinking your hands were magic. I still true by feel on my own stuff because I am cheap and stubborn, but I will admit my wheels come out closer to 0.5mm than 0.2mm on a good day. A gauge does not have mornings where it is tired or distracted, which is more than I can say for me. How long did it take before you stopped second guessing the dial and just trusted the number?

Blame the data all you want, but databases have zero mercy for bad joins. I once spent a whole Friday convinced our warehouse was sending ghost shipments, turns out I forgot to filter out cancelled orders with one dumb WHERE line. The real kicker is when you tell the team "found it" and they just nod like they knew all along.

Drove past a stalled solar farm outside El Paso last winter and the panels were still wrapped in plastic with tumbleweeds piled against the pallets. Same story, the developer got tangled up in a property line dispute and just walked away. I spent 6 months waiting on a permit for a simple roof setup while these big projects sit there doing NOTHING. Its just crazy how fast a funded project can rot when nobody has a reason to finish it.