Oh man that's brutal. I once paid a guy $500 to fix a leaky pipe and he just put duct tape on it.

Oh man, that's brutal. A long cheater bar and slow pressure has saved me more times than I can count. Also, if you've got one, an impact wrench can sometimes rattle them loose when nothing else works.

Your dad's point about pattern recognition is spot on. Gut feelings aren't random magic, they come from years of experience noticing small details without consciously thinking about it. Writers just skip the boring part because showing someone reading phone records for three hours doesn't make good TV.