That chicken wire cage story is painfully familiar, I've got the scars to prove it. Now I just leave the cages loose and let the stems kinda push their own way in, saves my thumbs and I don't have to explain the hammer marks on the table.

Learning to trust the charts is like learning to read the directions on a medicine bottle - you think you know your limits until the numbers prove otherwise. It's funny how the most boring safety measures end up being the ones that save your skin.

Wiggling every single wire like a noodle? That just gave me a flashback to a badly corroded trailer harness I fought with for almost an hour last fall. You'd bend one wire and nothing, bend another and the meter would flicker for half a second, then go dead again. Finally found a broken strand hidden right inside a rubber grommet where you couldn't even see it without peeling the insulation back. And that smell - once you get that burnt plastic smell in your nose it stays with you the rest of the day.