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HKYNC News & Views January 25, 2026 – Executive Summary
Hickory Hound News and Views Archive
📤This Week:
(Tuesday): Hickory 102: When Activity Masks Direction - How constant activity can hide a lack of direction—and how to learn to tell real progress from motion in systems that stay busy without moving forward.
(Thursday): Middle Class Traction #3: Housing → Continuity - Continuity happens when housing allows people to remain rooted over time.
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📤Next Week:
(Tuesday) - When Choice Exists Without Leverage- How to recognize decision environments that look empowering but don’t alter outcomes.
🧠Opening Reflection:
By the time most people in Hickory head to work in the morning, they've already burned through a significant slice of their day just getting there. Maybe it's dropping off the kids, filling up on gas, navigating traffic, or grabbing a quick breakfast or coffee because there wasn't time to prepare it at home. None of this feels overly dramatic—it's just the daily routine. But that routine can be quietly exhausting, and that's before the first clock-in of the day.
People are still putting in full days, often more than full. They're covering their shifts, enduring mandatory unpaid breaks, staying late for last-minute customers or boss demands, and picking up extra hours whenever they're available. On paper, it looks like responsibility—a sign of reliability and a willingness to go above and beyond. But does management even notice? Will it earn you any extra goodwill when you need a break or some understanding? In the grip of what feels like a corporate mind virus, it's highly doubtful.
In practice, this rat race barely lets the individual keep pace, let alone get ahead. That's why so many in the modern workforce have disengaged, especially post-pandemic. The paycheck clears, bills get paid, and whatever's left must be rationed carefully—including time itself. There are only so many hours in a day or week. Evenings shrink, sleep gets shortchanged, and weekends vanish into errands, chores, repairs, personal obligations, and desperate attempts at recovery. Days end with little left in the tank for investing in tomorrow; you're often just clinging on, prioritizing amid a growing pile of unfinished business cluttering the background.
This isn't about laziness, procrastination, or impatience—it's about value. When labor's price is suppressed, people don't work less; they work more, spending extra time on problems once handled elsewhere, like transportation, healthcare, childcare, and basic life logistics. Time that once built stability now burns away just trying to maintain it. The math rarely favors the average person. Yet too many push this burnout culture as the norm, insisting it's virtuous, even as it hollows out lives from the inside.
You see it in how people plan—or rather, how they don't. Fewer long-range bets; the rat race thrives on reactive, hour-to-hour decisions. Cancellations and accommodations dominate. No one risks commitments that can't be undone quickly. Folks stay put in homes or jobs not out of love, but because change demands time they can't spare. Experience accumulates, but personal leverage? Not so much. Years slip by, breeding a quiet wariness: things should feel easier by now, but fulfillment remains elusive. As an added insight, recent surveys underscore this—over 70% of U.S. workers report moderate to high burnout in 2025-2026, driven by stagnant real wages that, despite nominal gains, haven't outpaced inflation enough to restore pre-pandemic purchasing power. In places like North Carolina, where manufacturing and service jobs dominate, this translates to families stretching every dollar and hour thinner.
Communities like Hickory, Lenoir, and Morganton still hum on the surface: stores bustle, schools run smoothly, jobs stay filled. From afar, nothing seems broken. But beneath it all, time has shifted its allegiance. It no longer pays dividends for most; instead, it's consumed by endless sacrifice. One more year doesn't grant more breathing room than the last. Setbacks erase progress faster than before, and recovery drags on longer than it should. Grace is in short supply these days—an impossible standard demands perfection from imperfect people, with mistakes treated as unforgivable. Too many impose these irrational expectations downward while sparing themselves the same scrutiny. It's hypocrisy at its peak.
This is labor devaluation lived out: not outright collapse or chaos, but a steady siphoning of time from those doing the work. When wages lag costs, the gap doesn't disappear—it manifests as longer days, zero cushions, and no tolerance for accidents or errors. Life turns more transactional, every choice ticking against a clock. Folks, that's a profoundly sad state.
People sense this, even if unspoken: when patience yields nothing, when "just give it time" rings hollow, when time becomes the priciest expenditure with diminishing returns. That's the atmosphere framing this week—a world where effort is genuine, days are packed, and time has ceased being an ally for most working households. Once you grasp that, the rest of what's unfolding around us clicks into clearer, if sobering, focus.
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⭐ Feature Story ⭐
TIME — Part 1: Work Stops Paying Off
When Time Stops Compounding
For generations in places like Hickory, people believed that if you stuck it out, time would help. Time was on your side. You put in the years—learning the job, sticking it out through shifts and changes—and it paid off. Effort accumulated into something tangible: bills eased, savings grew, a house got paid down, breathing room appeared. That was the quiet promise in our manufacturing and service communities: show up reliably, go the extra mile, and life would gradually build more stability. Seniority brought leverage—better pay, more security, actual progress.
Those promises are in short supply these days.
People here are not short on effort. They're still rising early, handling mornings with kids and commutes on 40 or 321, grabbing gas that's stubbornly high, snagging coffee on the run because home routines got squeezed. They clock in for full shifts—often more—picking up overtime, staying late for last customers or unfinished tasks, learning new systems, adapting to new expectations. The days are full. The weeks are full. The years are full. What's missing is the payoff that used to come with that accumulation of experience. Time passes, but it isn't building much of anything.
When time compounds, each year reduces risk—you build cushion, make fewer emergency decisions, one setback doesn't erase months of progress. When time stops compounding, the opposite happens. Every year feels like a reset. One repair, one medical bill, one missed week of work can wipe out what little margin exists. Experience grows, but leverage doesn't.
This isn't about impatience or wanting shortcuts. It's about how long it takes to feel secure after doing what you were told to do. For a growing share of working households in Hickory, Lenoir, and Morganton, the answer is: longer than a normal life can tolerate. People are still waiting for the point where things "settle." It just never arrives.
You see it in how time is spent now—more hours devoted to managing basics: transportation, paperwork, scheduling, recovery from exhaustion itself. Less time goes toward planning, investing, or improving position. Time becomes something to be consumed carefully, not something you can afford to invest.
That shift changes behavior. People stop assuming tomorrow will be easier. They stop making long commitments. They protect what they have instead of reaching for more. This isn't pessimism—it's rational adjustment to an environment where time no longer pays interest.
Nothing here looks dramatic. Unemployment in the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton metro area sits at 4.1% for November 2025 (latest available), manufacturing holds around 38,000 jobs despite modest dips, stores stay open, paychecks clear, life keeps moving. But the relationship between time and progress has quietly flipped. Instead of easing pressure, time now carries it forward. Years don't reduce strain; they prolong it.
That's the condition this piece starts from. Not collapse. Not crisis. A subtler failure—one where people keep doing their part, but time itself no longer helps close the distance between effort and stability.
Once you recognize that personal shift, the broader patterns start to click into focus.
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Time as a Priced Commodity
Time is not a neutral backdrop or moral virtue. It is a commodity, and like any commodity, its value depends entirely on the conditions around it—who controls it, what it's traded for, and who captures the return.
In the world many of us were raised to believe in, time compounds like interest in a savings account. You invest consistent hours, years of reliability, and it multiplies: higher wages follow, promotions arrive, equity builds in a home, you gain the ability to say no to extra shifts without panic, you earn the luxury of planning instead of constant reaction. High-value time buys options. It opens doors. It creates breathing room that lasts. The people who hold that kind of time—executives with flexible calendars, investors who can wait out volatility, professionals whose skills command premium rates—watch their time appreciate. A single strong year or smart decision can secure the next decade.
Most working households in Hickory, Lenoir, and Morganton no longer live in that world.
Here, time is priced low at the source and extracted high in practice. Wages have lagged the real cost of living—housing, healthcare, transportation, childcare—so each hour worked buys less actual security than it once did. The gap doesn't vanish; it is absorbed by the worker through longer days, unpaid recovery, deferred repairs, and constant triage of necessities. Time stops compounding; it is consumed simply to hold position. You trade hours not for progress, but to maintain the current level of survival.
This is why platitudes like “just work harder” or “take more responsibility” feel so empty to so many. The math has shifted. When time is systematically devalued—through stagnant real purchasing power, rising baseline expenses, and jobs that demand perpetual availability without matching reward—the return on every additional hour shrinks. You run faster merely to stay in place, or you slip backward despite full commitment.
The pricing shift shows up in the quiet, everyday decisions that define life here right now. A parent passes on a community college class because evenings are already consumed by second shifts, gig driving, or family logistics. A skilled tradesperson remains in a lower-paying job because devoting time to look for a better job would mean weeks without income they cannot bridge. A family postpones a vacation, a roof repair, or even routine car maintenance—not out of indifference, but because the time cost (lost wages, added stress, risk of further setbacks) outweighs any possible gain. Time is rationed like a scarce resource: guard it fiercely, spend it only on what cannot be avoided, invest it nowhere because the expected return has evaporated.
This is not a collapse of individual ambition. It is economics unfolding at the household scale. Time carries a price tag, and for too many in our community, that payout has been deliberately suppressed while the demands upon it have risen. The outcome is a quiet but profound transfer: from the people performing the work to the systems and beneficiaries that profit from keeping labor inexpensive.
Once you view time not as infinite goodwill but as a priced asset whose value has been eroded, the exhaustion, the caution, the disengagement cease to look like personal failings. They become logical, predictable responses to a market that no longer rewards the investment of human time the way it once did.
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The Shrinking Center of the Middle
When time loses its ability to compound, it doesn’t feel worthless. It feels robbed. You’re still putting in the hours, still doing what’s asked, but your time keeps getting swallowed by demands that never pay off. Extra work becomes expected. Extra effort isn’t recognized. And this slowly turns into the norm.
When that happens, middle-class life doesn’t collapse overnight. It erodes. The space where effort once paid off with comfort, upward mobility, and monetary savings starts to narrow. In Hickory, Lenoir, and Morganton, people are still working in manufacturing plants, retail stores, and service jobs. Homes are still occupied. Bills still get paid. From the outside, things look fine.
But the buffer that once made the middle class durable—the small but critical room to absorb a setback—has quietly disappeared for many. What’s left is a life that functions, but no longer builds strength.
The middle has always been defined less by exact income levels than by that room to breathe: a missed paycheck didn’t mean crisis; a car repair didn’t blow a hole in the household budget; a medical bill didn’t derail the year’s plans. That room was built slowly, over years of steady work and predictable returns—time that compounded into savings, equity, and the confidence to take measured risks. As time stopped compounding, that room disappeared, replaced by constant vigilance.
What emerges is a defensive posture. Households manage risk every day. Decisions shorten in horizon. Planning horizons compress from years to months, or even weeks. People hold onto jobs, homes, and routines not because they’re ideal or fulfilling, but because changing them demands time, money, and uncertainty they can no longer afford. A worker with valuable skills stays in a stagnant role rather than pursue a better opportunity, knowing the transition period—gap in paychecks, potential relocation costs—could wipe out what little savings they have. A family postpones home repairs, skips children’s activities, or forgoes community college classes because the upfront costs and lost income outweigh any long-term gain when there’s a very limited financial runway.
Risk tolerance collapses under the weight of zero buffer. Long-term bets—starting a small business, moving for a promotion, investing in education—require the ability to forgo time and money without catastrophic fallout. When every setback threatens to erase progress, people protect their position rather than reach for more. They stay put, patch what’s breaking, anticipate the next cost spike. Time once spent building forward is redirected toward holding steady: managing debt, rationing necessities, preparing for the inevitable disruption.
This shrinking center is operational, not metaphorical. It constrains planning at the daily and yearly level. Vacations become rare or local because travel eats into the thin reserve. Retirement contributions stall because current bills take priority. The future is not abandoned—it is deferred, month by month, as the present demands every available resource just to maintain equilibrium.
In our region, the surface still looks stable. Stores bustle. Schools run on schedule. Manufacturing holds roughly 38,000 jobs despite modest dips, unemployment lingers around 3.6–4.3% in recent data, paychecks clear. Yet underneath, the middle has narrowed. The people who once moved steadily upward now move sideways at best, or slip backward on any disruption. The loss of margin isn’t visible in shuttered factories or empty streets—it’s felt in the quiet calculation behind every choice, the shortened horizon, the protective posture that replaces the old confidence that effort would lead somewhere better.
The Shrinking Center isn’t about failure or decline in character. It’s about exposure. As time loses value, households are forced to spend more of it protecting their position instead of improving it. The middle doesn’t vanish—it gets squeezed from both sides, surviving in name while losing the conditions that once made it stable. This is the pressure zone where most people now live: not poor, not secure, just close enough to the edge that every decision carries weight, and every year feels like it has more to lose than to gain.
This is the structural consequence of time devalued and buffers gone: not chaos, but a steady contraction of possibility. The center shrinks, and with it, the space where ordinary households could once plan, invest, and breathe.
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The Moral Equation
When the value of human time is pushed down to cut costs, something has to absorb the loss. That’s the moral equation in plain terms: savings and higher profits rise at the top, while workers pay for it. The people at the top call it increased productivity.
The consequences are easy to see. Less money per hour worked. More hours needed to make up the difference. Less room to recover from setbacks. Weaker bargaining power. Lower expectations becoming the new reality. And more time drained from households that already have little to spare.
This is not an accident of impersonal market forces. It is the result of design choices—mechanisms that have been built, sustained, and selectively enforced over decades, accelerating in recent years.
Offshoring shifts production, assembly, and even back-office work to places where labor is cheaper and protections are weaker. The upside is immediate and obvious: lower costs, steady output, and higher margins. The cost doesn’t disappear. It shows up back home… In places like Hickory, that means lost jobs in furniture and manufacturing plants, downward pressure on the wages that remain, and communities competing over fewer positions that still offer any stability.
Illegal labor substitution expands the labor pool outside enforceable standards. Employers gain access to workers who have limited legal recourse, suppressing wages and reducing the incentive to invest in training, retention, or fair conditions. The difference is absorbed by legal workers whose pay stagnates or declines, by communities strained by housing and service pressures, and by the undocumented workers themselves who remain in permanent vulnerability. Selective enforcement of immigration and labor laws is not oversight; it is a quiet policy choice that keeps labor artificially cheaper.
Selective enforcement applies the same logic to the rules that would otherwise raise labor costs—safety standards, overtime protections, wage-and-hour compliance, worker rights. When enforcement is inconsistent, under-resourced, or politically deprioritized, the cost of breaking or bending rules drops. Companies save on fines, equipment, training, and fair compensation. The difference is absorbed in higher injury rates, unpaid overtime, burnout, and the widespread understanding that many protections exist on paper but not in daily practice.
Capital concentration consolidates power in fewer hands—large corporations, private equity groups, platform monopolies—that can dictate terms downward through sheer scale. When a handful of buyers control supply chains, a few platforms dominate gig and delivery work… Hedge Funds and Private Equity groups now own large shares of housing and commercial property. This cornering of the market allows them to extract more value while pushing more financial risk downward.
The people who benefit from this setup are not the workers trying to make it work. Companies lower costs and protect profits. The pressure shows up on the other end as longer hours, unstable schedules, side work, and constant stress for the people doing the labor.
Instead of work leading to a life that stabilizes and gets easier over time, many people find themselves stuck managing one problem after another. Things don’t fall apart, but they don’t improve either. You work longer, stay flexible, and still feel one surprise away from trouble.
This isn’t about personal values or blaming individuals. It’s about who benefits and who pays. Some people get flexibility, protection, and room to recover when things go wrong. Others are expected to absorb every disruption themselves.
Those choices didn’t happen by accident. Labor was pushed cheaper because it saved money. Rules were enforced unevenly because it reduced costs. Power concentrated because it made returns more predictable. The result is simple: fewer people can live a stable, middle-class life without constant pressure.
People are still working hard. Time is still being spent. But the return on that time no longer builds security. That’s not a mystery. It’s the outcome of decisions that shifted risk downward and kept the gains at the top.
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Gig Work: Flexibility Without Leverage
Gig work is often sold as flexibility. Set your own hours. Fill the income gaps. Work on your own terms. On paper, it sounds like control. In real life, it has become one of the clearest ways time gets drained rather than restored.
Gig work doesn’t raise the value of personal time. It takes more of it, often under the appearance of choice.
What these digital platforms market as empowerment—be your own boss, earn on demand—usually turns into a different reality for people in the communities they live in. Income is irregular. Algorithms control access to work. There are no benefits and no safety net. Availability becomes a constant requirement. What’s called flexibility breaks into fragmented hours that never add up to stability. Wasted motion replaces economic progress.
In this region, gig work rarely replaces a regular job. It fills some gaps, but once you break down the costs versus what you actually earn, the question becomes simple: is it worth the time? There is constant competition. You don’t control a territory. There is no training advantage or specialized skill that sets you apart. Anyone can log in, and everyone is competing for the same errands.
People clock out of manufacturing plants, retail stores, and service jobs, then open DoorDash, Uber Eats, Instacart, or similar apps to cover what their main paycheck no longer does. Manufacturing still employs roughly 38,000 people in the Hickory area, and unemployment has stayed between 3.6 and 4.3 percent in recent months. People are working. The pay just isn’t keeping up.
So workers sell the same day twice. Once to their employer. Then again to a platform. Time stretches longer, but life doesn’t get easier.
The defining feature of gig work is irregular income. Hours and pay swing constantly—driven by demand spikes, weather, holidays, algorithms, and timing, not skill or experience. That built-in instability pushes workers to stay available longer than they want to, or should have to. Phones stay on. Peak windows get chased. Low-paying runs get accepted just to stay eligible for future work.
The structure is familiar. It operates less like steady employment and more like a casino
gambling floor—unpredictable rewards, flashing incentives, and constant pressure to keep playing.
Time that could have gone toward rest, family, or personal plans gets eaten up by waiting and reacting. Many people end up working more total hours just to chase what used to be the baseline expectation of a steady paycheck.
Control sits elsewhere. Algorithms determine a Gigster’s visibility, priority, pay adjustments, and access. There is little transparency and almost no recourse when something feels wrong. Deactivation can arrive without warning, cutting off income instantly.
There is also no safety net. If you are sick, injured, burned out, or your car breaks down, income stops immediately. All risk—expenses, downtime, volatility—lands on the worker, while platforms scale profit by avoiding it.
Burnout follows naturally. Surveys in 2025–2026 show more than half of gig workers reporting moderate to high burnout. Erratic schedules isolate people. Ratings and performance metrics create constant surveillance. The mental load of always being “on” never lifts.
Availability pressure blurs every boundary. Apps ping during dinner, family time, or late at night with incentives that disappear if ignored. Turning down work today can mean fewer opportunities tomorrow. Rest becomes optional.
In North Carolina, gig workers still operate with very little protection in 2026. There are no statewide pay floors, no safeguards against sudden deactivation, no portable benefits, and no requirements for platforms to explain how their algorithms make decisions. A 2025 proposal to even study unemployment insurance for gig workers stalled and went nowhere.
Because most are classified as independent contractors, they’re left outside the protections that traditional workers still have. The local result is predictable: longer reactive workdays, shorter evenings for rest or family, and weekends shaped around logging in whenever the app signals opportunity.
What gig work ultimately does is turn uncertainty into personal responsibility. Risk is pushed downward so platforms don’t have to carry it. Time is priced minute by minute. Workers absorb volatility so the system can scale profitably. This doesn’t fix the problem of time no longer compounding. It accelerates it.
Seen this way, gig work isn’t a break from the old grind. It’s a high-tech extension of it. People keep moving, keep earning, and keep operating—while time never quite turns
into security. For many in our community, sacrifice gets marketed as empowerment, even as the financial return on their time investment keeps shrinking.
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In Closing
This is where this week’s accounting stops. Not at collapse, and not at comfort, but at a clear view of how time is being spent and what it’s returning right now. People are still working. Systems are still operating. Life still moves forward. But the relationship between effort and security has shifted, and pretending otherwise only adds to the strain.
Next week, we move past the mechanics and look at what this condition produces over time—how people adapt to it, how expectations narrow, and why a society can keep functioning even as the space for stability quietly shrinks. Not as theory, but as lived behavior we can already see taking shape around us.
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My Own Time Ω
I don’t write this section to complain, and I’m not doing it to put on a show, because I’ve never been an exhibitionist. I write it as an accounting. Just to take stock and say plainly and honestly where things stand here in early 2026.
Most of my working life has been spent in places where time wasn’t negotiable. In kitchens, timing isn’t optional. You miss a beat and it snowballs fast. Orders stack up. Plates cool. Service starts slipping. The whole rhythm falls apart. After more than forty years—starting from the bottom, working through every station as a real, working chef in fine dining, catering, country clubs, and resorts—you learn a hard truth: time only works in your favor when the structure around you respects the input. Miss your mise en place and things unravel. Miss the connection between effort and reward, and people don’t just burn out—they leave. Or worse, they stay and slowly grind themselves down.
That lesson didn’t stay in the kitchen. It followed me into bigger systems. Different language, same math. I understood it by studying economics and finance: when things are working the way they’re supposed to, inputs turn into compounding returns. Effort pays. Experience buys security and stability. Extra work restores breathing room. When that stops happening, it isn’t because people suddenly stopped doing their part. It’s because the structure stopped honoring the math.
What I see now—in Hickory, across Catawba County, up and down the Foothills Corridor, and nationally—isn’t people walking away from responsibility. Folks are still showing up. They take extra shifts. They reroute commutes to save gas. They juggle multiple obligations. They absorb unpaid downtime when something breaks. Every decision gets calibrated carefully so nothing tips over into a crisis. The problem is the return on that time has thinned out dramatically. Experience doesn’t buy much relief anymore. Overtime and side gigs don’t reliably rebuild breathing room. One hit—a car repair, a medical bill, a delayed paycheck—can wipe out months of careful management.
The local numbers tell part of the story. Unemployment in Catawba County sat around four percent in late 2025, with the Hickory metro closer to 4.3 percent. On paper, that looks fine. But those numbers hide underemployment, gig job stacking, and households running with almost no buffer at all. Statewide, North Carolina unemployment held around 3.8 percent, while headlines celebrated job announcements and incentives. Meanwhile, the day-to-day math for working families keeps getting harder. We are dealing with a true affordability crisis.
I live inside that equation. Time and energy are limited. When more and more of both get spent just holding your ground—keeping things from sliding backward instead of moving forward—your assumptions change. You stop assuming tomorrow will be easier. You start rationing what little flexibility you’ve got left. Caution becomes the default—not because you’ve given up, and not because you’re lazy, but because the margin for error has almost disappeared. One misstep and the cascade starts, just like a backed-up kitchen line on a slammed Saturday night.
I draw a hard line here, the same one my grandparents lived by. I don’t romanticize struggle, and I don’t treat exhaustion like it’s a virtue. I judge my days by one blunt question: did this block of time actually move something forward, or did it just keep things from falling apart? Lately, too many days fall into the second category. Not because of bad choices, but because the structure demands constant vigilance while offering very little durable stability in return.
That’s the hinge I keep coming back to. Time didn’t lose value by accident. It wasn’t neutral. It was priced down. Jobs were offshored. Rules got enforced selectively. Gig platforms figured out how to extract availability without providing protection. Gains moved upward to shareholders and executives. Losses got spread out across millions of households downstream.
This isn’t a complaint. It’s inventory. Time still matters deeply, even when larger systems treat it like a cheap, disposable input. Any path toward reclaiming direction—personally or as a community—starts with being honest about where time is going now, what it actually buys, and what it no longer gives back.
That honesty is the baseline for the work I’m doing through Shell Cooperative and these ongoing Deep Research series. Without it, reform stays performative. With it, at least we’re diagnosing the right problem.
Next week, I want to look at what living under this kind of pressure produces over time—not in theory, but in real, observable behavior. The plans people quietly stop making. The commitments they hesitate to take on. The expectations they lower once they realize time doesn’t work the way it used to.
You can see it in the person who adapts reluctantly to keep their life from falling completely apart. In the person who learns to expect less, not because they’ve given up, but because the risk is something they can’t afford. And in the person who can’t afford to relax at all—who stays permanently on guard, always ready for the next disruption. These aren’t failures of character. They’re rational responses to an environment that changed the rules without ever saying so.
If you read this I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart!
