Dude, you basically invented a breakfast cryptid. Folks are out here hunting for the Legendary Burrito Person like you're Bigfoot with a salsa addiction. The guy driving 2 hours is either your biggest fan or your first stalker, and honestly, either way he's probably gonna be disappointed when he finds out you just eat the burritos, you don't manifest them. Just start charging a "meeting fee" and call it a food tour. Or better yet, sell him a t-shirt that says "I drove 2 hours and all I got was this lousy tortilla." That's the real hustle.

My buddy in the NW got screwed the exact same way last year with a crew he found on Facebook Marketplace. They told him the walls were dry and skipped the vapor barrier work too, and he ended up with that musty smell coming back in like a month. I read somewhere that most of these cheap Kijiji guys are just doing the bare minimum to get paid, and they count on you not checking behind the baseboards until it's too late. The kicker is, $850 sounds like a deal but you paid for the lesson, not the fix. You did the RIGHT thing redoing it yourself because the materials are cheap, it's just the labor that costs an arm and a leg, and clearly these guys ain't worth that. Next time, even a mid-range company from a google search is safer than rolling the dice on a guy with a van and a wet vac. Hope that mold didn't spread too far, because that's the part that REALLY gets expensive.

The bit about waiting days for a reply really hit me. My buddy Mark still runs a forum for old camcorder nerds, and last year someone finally replied to a thread he posted in 2011 about a tape deck issue. He screenshotted it and sent it to me like it was a birthday gift. We both cracked up because the guy who replied basically wrote a whole novel about how he fixed the same problem, and Mark said it felt like getting mail from a pen pal in another country. I think the slow pace is what made those places special, people actually thought about what they wrote instead of just reacting. You can't get that back now, but at least some of those forums are still sitting there like time capsules.

You know what, I used to be ALL about wire baskets because that's what every "pro" uses on YouTube. But after reading your experience, I'm honestly rethinking my whole setup. My wire basket always leaves little bits of fries stuck in the mesh that I have to pick out, and greasy oil splatters all over my stovetop no matter how careful I am. Your soggy batch story makes me wonder if I'm just dealing with different problems but ending up in the same frustrating place. Maybe solid baskets with a quick shake halfway through cooking would actually work better for home use.

Wait, did you say you did 7 days straight back in June? Most folks I know count a work week as Monday through Friday, not a full 7 days. That's a solid stretch though, especially on backroads through the park... I did something similar a few years back and found the biggest shock was how much I missed the quiet time in the car to mentally prep for the day. You grab that coffee on foot or balancing on the bike? That's a skill I never mastered without spilling half of it.