Honestly I think it's a predator thing, they feel safer when you're not towering over them like some giant hawk. I noticed my own cat only cuddles hard when I'm lying flat on the floor watching TV, it's like a switch flips in her brain.

Four different brokers" is wild to me. I get that short hops can be a pain for drivers since the payout is smaller per mile, but that level of chaos sounds like a comedy of errors, not a normal booking. You'd think someone would just grab that load for gas money alone, it's barely a day of driving. My bet is the brokers were double-booking or fishing for a better rate and kept stringing you along, which is why the dates kept sliding. Did anyone ever explain what the actual holdup was, or was it just a bunch of "driver issues" with zero details each time?

Man, I gotta push back on this. Those high-mileage cars you're seeing are the exception, not the rule. Most people bail on a vehicle once it hits 120k or so because they're tired of throwing money at it. You're probably remembering the few regulars who actually maintain their junk, but for every one of those, I bet you've got five cars that come in once for an oil change and then disappear because the transmission falls out or the frame rusts through. Track how many of those 1,000 were the same dozen cars coming back every 3,000 miles, and the story changes real quick. The average person doesn't want to sink $800 into a car worth $1,500, they just buy another beater. Your tally makes it look like basic upkeep saves everything, but that's survivorship bias. The real pattern is most high-mileage cars are one bad repair away from the scrapyard.