Honestly, that brings back a memory from when I was pouring a slab in San Antonio back in '18. A buddy of mine had a trowel blade let go and it zipped past his hard hat and stuck into a bucket of water we had sitting there. We still joke about it but man, it was dead silent for a solid minute after.

God, right? Its like they designed it to be as confusing as possible on purpose. You click one thing and end up in some random deep archive from 1912. I've spent way too many hours just trying to find a basic copyright date for an old song. It's legit painful when you just need one simple piece of info.

Respectfully, I see this a little different. Checking date stamps is important sure, but a seller who unloads expired materials without saying anything is doing folks dirty. I've been burned on Marketplace too and it stings because you expect someone to at least be honest about what they're selling. A pallet of mortar is heavy and a pain to move, they knew what they had. And while you can sometimes make old mortar work, three rows of block failing tells me that batch was toast no matter how you mixed it. Sometimes you just have to cut your losses and start fresh, that's the hard lesson.

@hollyscott "You just remember it" is EXACTLY the kind of thinking that gets people in trouble. I see this same attitude everywhere now, not just with visas. People treat memory like it's a badge of honor when really it's just rolling the dice. My mom used to say "I'll remember" about medical appointments and then she missed a cancer screening twice in a row. We are NOT built to hold onto random dates from three months ago. The calendar alert is just a tool, same as writing it on your hand or checking your passport. What matters is that you have a SYSTEM instead of just hoping your brain works that day. Nobody is lazy for using a reminder. That's like saying people who wear seatbelts are lazy drivers.

And that "goodwill" move you mentioned is actually the real secret here. If you start with 50% in the contract, you can always come down to 40% or even 35% if the client pushes back, and they feel like they won something. But if you start at 30%, you've got nowhere to go but down to 25% or 20%, and that's barely worth the paperwork. I've started putting 45% as the standard number in my contracts for any project that takes more than a week of my time, because it covers the lost opportunity cost of turning down other work while their thing was supposed to be happening.