Serious question about those anti-static mat kits for bench work

Always figured they were mostly hype since I'd been using cardboard for years without issues. Then I zapped a $400 comm panel last month and finally bought a proper 3M mat kit from Grainger. Has anyone else had a close call like that change their mind on something they thought was overkill?

Old crane hand named Ray told me to stop choking up on the boom controls

I was on a job in Tacoma last spring moving some HVAC units onto a rooftop. Ray, this guy who's been running cranes since the 70s, kept yelling at me to lighten my grip on the levers. I thought he was just being a grump but after about an hour I tried it and the swing was way smoother. Has anyone else had an old timer change how you handle the controls?

Tried tracking down an air leak under the dash on a King Air and lost 6 hours to a loose hose clamp

Last month I was chasing a cabin pressure leak that kept showing up in the logbook, and I pulled half the interior apart before I found a clamp that was just barely loose behind the right sidewall. Took me a full shift to locate it because the leak only showed at altitude and I couldn't replicate it on the ground. Has anyone else spent way too long hunting a simple leak that turned out to be something dumb like a clamp or a seal?

Tried a $3 bag of dried beans instead of canned for soup and saved like $12

Wasted $120 on a CNC router bit bundle that was completely wrong for acrylic

I was trying to cut some acrylic panels for a side window mod on my old tower. Grabbed this big 20 piece CNC bit set off Facebook Marketplace from a guy in Austin, thinking I was getting a steal. Turns out almost all of them were for wood and aluminum, nothing with a proper O-flute for plastic. Ended up melting the edges of my first panel and chipping the second before I figured it out. Has anyone else bought a tool bundle that looked good but was totally useless for what you needed?

Vent: Took me 4 hours to remove a single dead pine in my own yard in Phoenix

I do this for a living but my own property is a different story. This pine had been dead for about a year and I figured it would be a quick 30 minute job. Wrong. The base was wrapped around a buried water line and the roots had fused with some old concrete from a previous patio. Ended up digging out the stump by hand for 3 hours after the top came down. Guess I got too confident since I'm not charging myself. Has anyone else wasted a whole afternoon on a tree that should have taken no time?

I finally stopped using that cheap spray-on concrete sealer from the big box store

Lost $180 on a 5-gallon bucket of the stuff that peeled off my driveway in less than 6 months here in Nashville, now I'm stuck with a patchy mess that I have to grind off before I can do it right - has anyone else dealt with that nightmare of fixing a failed sealer job?

Help me figure out this noise on a 2008 Ford F-150 I looked at

I was checking out a 2008 Ford F-150 with 180,000 miles at a dealer lot in Denver yesterday. It has a rhythmic clicking sound from the passenger side front wheel when I turned left. Could it be a bad CV axle or maybe something in the hub assembly? Anyone run into this on one of these trucks?

Had the worst Valentine's Day rush of my career last week

I prepped 80 arrangements and still ran out of roses by noon. A guy actually offered me $50 to take the display hydrangeas off my hands because his wife loves purple. Has anyone else had a customer get weirdly intense about a specific flower during a holiday rush?

Took 6 hours to hang a single shelf because the stud finder kept lying to me

I thought hanging a floating shelf would be a quick 20 minute job in my Brooklyn apartment. But my stud finder kept beeping at random spots and I finally gave up on it after drilling 4 pilot holes into nothing but drywall. I ended up using the old trick of tapping on the wall and measuring from the corner, which took forever because my building is from 1920 and nothing is square. The whole shelf install turned into a 6 hour ordeal with me sitting on the floor arguing with a level. I still don't know if that shelf is actually secure or if it will come down the first time I put a book on it. Has anyone else had a cheap stud finder completely waste their afternoon?