3 AM deadline" - that's a red flag right there.

Exactly. That idea of preserving the story is what gets me every time. You see a dent in a tailgate and you just know it's from a kid's first time backing up a trailer or a load of firewood that was way too heavy. That isn't just damage, it's a memory carved into the metal. When you're fixing something like that, you're not just welding a patch or slapping on body filler. You're making sure that memory stays visible and usable for the next person who comes along to add their own scratches to it. It changes the whole job from a simple task into something almost sacred, like you're the caretaker of a little piece of someone's life.

Heard a friend @shane165 knew had the same problem with gourmet popcorn subscriptions.

Oh come on, you can fix a slab easy enough with a self leveler. I did my whole basement last summer and the floor had a 1/2 inch dip in one corner. Poured the leveler, waited a day, smooth as glass. If people are too lazy to spend the extra day and $40 on a bag of leveler that's on them, not the slab. And tack strip doesn't care about dips anyway if you float the laminate right with a good underlayment. I've laid carpet over way worse slabs and never had seams popping. The real problem is everyone wants to skip the prep work and blame the house.

Did you really have them stacked high enough to type comfortably? You might have actually been hurting your neck worse looking down at those books the whole time.