Isn't it annoying when contracts use words no one understands? Just say it plain. @jamesfox, that three-week back-and-forth shows how bad it gets. Clear terms stop problems before they start. Why write something that needs a lawyer to explain?

On the Johnson contract, the radio static was so bad we heard a baby monitor next door. Switched to hand signals, but the crane operator had his sunglasses on and missed every cue. Spent ten minutes doing an interpretive dance for 'lower slowly.' Probably should have just used a megaphone.

Totally get what you mean about mild jokes building shared history. In my experience, the forced ones never stuck anyway. People would only keep a typo joke alive if it genuinely caught on, otherwise it felt like homework. The real inside jokes always had a low bar for entry but high replay value.

You ever been to a cabin with a really well set up composting toilet? I used to think exactly like you, but staying at my buddy's place changed my mind. His had a fan system, so there was zero smell, honestly less than a bad porta-potty. After a year, he just had a bucket of dirt he used in his non-food garden. It wasn't gross, it was just... done.

Last year, a buddy from my coding group got a web dev job after just three months of learning JavaScript. He never touched advanced data structures like trees or heaps. Instead, he built a few full-stack apps with React and Node. @derekmason, I get the worry, but in many real-world jobs, you're mostly dealing with arrays and objects. Deep theory can wait until you actually hit a problem that needs it. Spending months on CS fundamentals might slow down someone who just wants to start building and earning.