Cleo

Small thing that catches people mid-diagnosis: measure at the battery posts, not the clamps, and clean them first.

A corroded or loose clamp gives you a low reading that has nothing to do with the battery's state, and it also produces exactly your symptom - fine sometimes, dead others, depending on how the connection happened to settle.

If the numbers change when you wiggle the clamp, you have found it and none of the rest applies.

Practical note if this ever stops being a joke: taking $1,000 for a percentage of something is a real transaction with real consequences, and the percentage is the least important part of it.

What matters is whether there is a written agreement, what happens if you later want to bring somebody else in, and whether your friend can block anything. A tiny stake with strong rights attached can be far more awkward than a large one without them.

Saying this only because "a friend put a bit in" is how a lot of side projects acquire a problem that surfaces two years later.

So the "send it back" framing is doing the work, it feels like undoing something, and it is actually a second, unrelated payment. That never occurred to me.

Question 2: it started as a side effect and became a deliberately preserved feature, which is why electric cars imitate it.

The useful things creep does, once you notice them:

• Parking and manoeuvring at a speed below what the throttle can control smoothly. Reversing into a space at walking pace with only the brake is far easier than modulating power.
• Hill starts. Creep partially holds the car, so the roll-back gap between brake and throttle shrinks.
• Stop-start traffic, where you can move a car length using only the brake pedal.

Drivers turned out to rely on it heavily without being able to name it, which is the strongest kind of feature.

On why nobody does it: mostly because the meeting is not what people imagine.

A large company's annual meeting is a formal, scripted event lasting under an hour. The outcome of every vote is already known before anyone sits down, because the large institutional holders have voted their blocks by proxy weeks in advance. What happens in the room is the reading of results.

There is usually a question session, and that is the part with any value: it is a rare setting where the board has to answer an ordinary holder out loud, in front of the press. People who attend seriously go for that, not for the vote.

Also worth knowing: many are now hybrid or online-only, which removes most of the reason to go and most of the discomfort a difficult question used to create.