I spent 3 years overlaying maps wrong, a hiking trail in Bend showed me
Tbh I used to just line up map edges by eye and call it good. Then last Saturday I was out near Tumalo Falls and my GPS kept saying I was 200 feet off the trail, but I was clearly standing on it. Turned out I never matched the grid lines, just the border of the page, so every overlay was tilted about 4 degrees. A buddy laughed and showed me how to use the corner ticks instead. Has anyone else had a dumber map fail that took them way too long to admit?
This reminds me of how my dad hung shelves for years using the bubble level on his phone before he figured out the phone case was messing up the reading. Same kind of thing. You trust the tool without checking the tool itself. I did the same with recipes for a while, never weighing flour, just scooping, and wondering why my cookies always came out flat. Small mistakes stack up quiet until something finally shows you the gap, like that trail did for you.