There's a lot of truth to "writing things down changes everything." I had a guy who was all over the place with requests, but once I told him every change had to go in an email thread, things calmed down. It made him think twice before asking for something dumb, and it gave me something to point to when he forgot what he agreed to. Having that paper trail is really the only reason I stuck with it too, since it made the whole thing feel less like a gamble.

Right? And what makes it worse is you know you did it to yourself, you look at the wrong cable and just grab it without thinking. Why do we always blame the cable or the drawer instead of admitting we were in a rush? Does anyone actually sort their chargers so this never happens again, or is that a myth like matching socks from the dryer?

sweat the small stuff" made all the difference with my own book repairs.

Makes me feel dumb for hauling all those bags of concrete around.

Not enough mud is definitely part of it, but there's more. You gotta think about how drywall mud is basically water with some glue and dust in it. That water evaporates out, so the mud shrinks like wet clay does. The trick I learned is to deliberately overfill the patch on your first pass. Like pile it up a quarter inch higher than the wall surface. Then when it dries, it shrinks right down to flat. But don't go too nuts with it or else you're sanding forever. Also using hot mud (the kind that sets chemically) shrinks way less than the regular all-purpose stuff.