Oh man, that's scary. Hope your buddy was alright. Cheap tools can be so dangerous.

Everything's too fast now, even coffee.

Look at it, honestly. I was going for a nice little veggie patch but it's basically a swamp now. I mean, maybe I should just give up and buy some rubber boots to go with my new rice farm. It's kind of sad when your biggest crop is just standing water.

Oh man, that sounds super stressful! I always thought just having a map was enough, but a similar thing happened to me and I changed my whole system. Now I always have a digital map on my phone with GPS, like Gaia GPS, as a backup to my paper map. It shows your exact little dot moving so you can see if you're drifting off the trail line even when you can't see the ground path. That combo has saved me a couple times when trails got faint or washed out.

That "simple fix" you mentioned is often not so simple for a new diver. I've found those extra steps in the manual are easy to overlook when you're learning a dozen other things. Good on that veteran for taking the time to show you.