Drove 40 minutes last week to pick up a replacement thermometer from a shop that sells them to BBQ comp teams, and the guy behind the counter told me he's seen more ruined cooks from probe slippage than from bad fires, which made me realize it's the same story everywhere in life. People lose their whole day over one little thing that could've been fixed with a dollar's worth of prevention, like a bungee cord on a trailer or a spare set of keys in the house. That rubber band trick your buddy uses is just the start, I've started taping my probe cable to the handle of my smoker with blue painter's tape, and it's never moved once, not even in a windy thunderstorm. The bigger pattern I've noticed is that most people, myself included, only learn to check their gear twice after something expensive falls apart, and that's just dumb because the fix is always boring and simple. Now I double check everything, the probes, the wood supply, even the propane gauge on my backup tank, before I even light the fire, and it's made me a calmer person overall. You're not unlucky, you just got hit by the same wall everybody hits when they trust one tool too much, but at least now you know the secret that the pros live by.

Wait, are you saying the wine spill was a blessing in disguise? Because I would've just let them fight it out.