Man that $400 hit and losing a whole Saturday stinks. I hear you on the rippling carpet thing, I had a similar situation with a bedroom I did with just a knee kicker and the customer called me three months later saying it looked like a wrinkled shirt. Had to pull up all the tack strips and redo the whole thing because the power stretcher was the only way to get it tight enough around the corners. It's one of those lessons you only learn once.

I gotta say I see it differently. The ruler trick can be annoying for sure but I think a lot of times it's the only way to get consistent measurements when you're working with old houses that aren't square. Seven chains ruined sounds like there was probably something else going on with the material or the installation itself. Maybe the walls were really out of whack or the cuts weren't adjusted for the actual wall condition. I've seen plenty of straight edges give people a false sense of security too.

Does recapping fix the yellow capacitor goo issue on those old Compaqs too?

Did you set up a separate email just for the financial stuff or use something like a burner email service? I actually did the same thing after my own scare, moved all my banking and investment logins to a totally separate free email account I never use for anything else. That plus the authenticator app on my phone feels like a solid wall between the bad guys and my money, even if my main inbox gets compromised.

Wait, are you serious that will-change: transform actually dropped load time by that much? Honestly, that sounds too good to be true for a CSS property. Ngl, I've seen people throw that fix around for animation smoothness but never for actual page load speed. Tbh, that's wild because I always thought will-change was just for telling the browser to prepare for animations, not for speeding up something like a sidebar. Honestly, now I'm tempted to go test it on my own site to see if it actually works like that or if it was just a coincidence.