So you logged 1,000 haircuts in 3 years and that felt like a big deal? That's about one a day if you work most days. Seems like a normal pace for someone cutting hair, not some huge milestone. Numbers like that can mess with your head because the first hundred always feels slow, but that's true for anything you do over and over. Tracking it is fine if you get something out of it, but acting like it hit you hard is kind of a lot for a count you made up yourself.

Roll the dice if you want but that old hand was fitting pipe in 2013 and QC has gotten a lot stricter since then. The book calls for those tacks for a reason, and its not because some engineer wanted to make your life hard, its because they ran the numbers on how that pipe moves when it heats up. Yeah 4 tacks might pull straight on a bench test in the shop, but throw that header in a rack with real world stress on it and see what happens over time. If the next QC guy flags it and makes you cut and re-tack, you just cost the company a day of work to save yourself ten minutes. Do it by the book and let the old timers do it their way on their own jobs.