Ha man, your buddy is basically playing Russian roulette with a toolbox and I respect the chaos. Ngl, preventative maintenance bites you sometimes but that battery photo is the kind of evidence that keeps me swapping parts early. I think both of you are lucky, but you're also stacking the deck by making smart bets. Honestly, if you hit 10k hours with zero failures, you're either blessed by the avionics gods or you've got a hex on your plane that scares the parts into behaving.

Did I just learn I've been installing fancy failure floors for 5 years?

Man I was the exact same way with a barber named Sal at my shop. He kept telling me to use witch hazel after a shave and I laughed it off for like a year. Finally tried it on a guy with sensitive skin and the redness was gone in minutes. Now I keep a bottle on my station every day. The cold razor thing though... I've been using warm water my whole career and never thought twice about it. Gonna give it a shot on my next coarse hair client and see if it's really that different.

But isn't the risk that the slow setup just makes people put the book down? I dropped "In the Woods" twice before I pushed through, and I read mysteries constantly. The weather stuff in "The Dry" worked for me because it felt immediate, like the heat was pressing on you while you read. But with Tana French, I kept wondering if she was just wasting my time or if there was actually a plan. Did you ever feel like she could have cut 50 pages from that first half and still gotten the same effect?

Had a friend in a similar spot where her team was basically running damage control while she convinced herself she was fine. If she's got legit people around her they need to pull her aside and get her some real help before the brand deals start drying up.