Did you really think a drip would just magically fix itself? I had a similar thing with a garden hose spigot outside my house. Dripped for months, I'd just put a bucket under it. Then one freezing night the whole thing cracked wide open and water was spraying everywhere until I could shut off the main. Had to replace the whole spigot and a section of pipe inside the wall. That little drip was a warning I ignored for way too long.

Caught my old dog napping in a patch of sunbeams that moved across the living room floor one afternoon. She shifted every twenty minutes or so to stay right in the warm spot, totally unconscious of it. Made me wonder if animals have the same kind of internal light tracker. Ever seen your pets follow a sunbeam like that?

That old timer Mike sounds like the kind of guy who's seen it all. You saying he laughed made me think of this ironworker I knew named Stu who taught me to never let the heat get to you when a weld goes bad. He said if you cuss or throw a fit, it's like the steel knows and fights back. I've seen guys lose their cool and mess up a whole beam because of it. His trick was just to walk away for a minute, take a long drink of water, and come back at it calm. Stupid simple, but it's saved my tail more than I'd like to admit. You ever get advice that had nothing to do with the actual work but still made you better at it?

Dropped a whole weekend on a bogus medieval trench once. Turned out I was digging through a 19th century dump site that got plowed over an old Roman villa. Learned my lesson hard. Started doing a deep surface survey first. Walk the whole area in a grid, map everything weird looking. Red flags are anything melted, weird glass, or odd color changes in the soil. Saved me months of wasted work since.

Notices how little things like that slip through the cracks everywhere, not just in shops...