Pro tip: I was sitting in my car in the school parking lot after a parent yelled at me over a missing permission slip, and I finally started writing down every single 'task' I do that isn't in my job description.

Appreciation post: I used to tape my wire nuts, now I just use the ones with the built-in skirt.

Switched after a job in Phoenix where the heat kept melting my tape. Anyone else find the pre-skirted ones actually hold up better long term?

A lesson from an old hand on the Columbia River

Years back, I was running a small cutterhead dredge near Portland and kept fighting with the suction line clogging. An older operator named Ray, who was watching from the bank, just yelled over, 'Kid, you're digging too fast for that silt. Let the river do the work.' He came aboard and showed me how to read the water color and feel the pump vibration to find the right speed. I still think about that every time I'm in soft material. What's the best piece of simple, hands-on advice you ever got on the water?

TIL I was writing my Python loops backwards for months

I was building a simple script to rename files in a folder, and it kept skipping every other one. After staring at the screen for an hour, I printed the index at each step. I realized I was using 'for i in range(len(files), 0, -1)' when I just needed 'for i in range(len(files))'. Has anyone else had a simple syntax mistake that broke a whole project?

Vent: My dad kept asking to 'borrow' $50 every week, so I told him I'd only 'loan' it if he signed a contract.

I printed a fake, overly official looking one with a 20% interest clause and a notary stamp from a free template. He hasn't asked for money in three months now. Anyone else used a weird trick to stop the constant small asks?