Man, come on, the old lead was not totally wrong. A toner is a crutch, and crutches make you weak if you lean on them from day one. Plenty of guys in this trade can't find a short in a j-box without their little wand singing at them, and then the battery dies or the tone bleeds into every pair in the bundle and they're just as lost as you were in Sparks. That helper tagged your run in 10 minutes, sure, but he probably couldn't tell you why the tone jumped or what the layout even looked like when he was done, he just pointed at the beeper. You spent two years learning to read the wire with your hands and eyes, and now the tool actually adds something instead of replacing something. The mule feeling is just the price of being stubborn, and stubborn is how you get good.

My grandma's oven did the same thing one Thanksgiving and she just kept opening the door to poke the turkey with a fork, which of course made everything worse. We ate a very dry bird that year and nobody said a word about it.