Hell yeah, fresh grounds beat stale bags any day.

Black ones are the only ones I buy now after the same exact lesson. Used to think a zip tie was a zip tie and grabbed whatever was closest at the register. Then spent an afternoon re-securing a trailer light harness three times because the clear ones kept crumbling in my hands. You're right, it's night and day. The black ones hold up for years, the clear ones don't even last a season. Cheap lesson to learn, but annoying to learn it twice.

Man oh man, that story hits close to home. I once watched a guy spend an entire shift trying to drill through a hardened steel block because his feed rate was set for aluminum. He kept saying the bit was smoking and he swore the machine was haunted. He even tried adding coolant by hand and wearing oven mitts because he thought it was overheating from the ghost. After six hours and a dozen broken bits, he finally checked his program and saw he left the "ALUM" speed override on from the previous job. He stormed off and didn't come back for two days. Sometimes you just gotta laugh at the chaos we make for ourselves.