That reminds me of an article about emotional labor in service jobs. It called that forced cheer a hidden cost of customer-facing work. Makes you wonder how many smiles are actually just part of the uniform.

So you had to redo the whole loop because of a kink? That sounds brutal. Did you try bending the tubes before you put them in to see how they'd sit, or is that kind of thing impossible to really test until the whole system is under pressure?

Yeah, I read an article about that exact thing with kitchen knives. The cheap ones go dull fast and you end up spending more in the long run.

Without it feeling like a chore" is the part I don't get. If checking in feels like a chore, maybe you don't actually want to do it. I just call my friends when I think of them.

Read a firefighter's blog where they said chimney fires can hit 2000 degrees. At that point the bricks expand and crack, and the mortar just turns to powder. They said you can actually hear the masonry popping like gunshots from the stress.