Wait, squeezing the lever first actually pushes the housing? That never even crossed my mind. I always figured the lever pull was just to seat things and take up slack, not that it could shove the housing and let the cable creep back. That would explain why my shifting would feel fine in the stand and then go soft on the first real ride. Guess I've been lucky it caught at all.

The thing nobody talks about is that "teh" is actually one of the most common typos in the English language, so it's not like you're out here inventing new mistakes. Our brains process words as whole chunks instead of letter by letter, so when we type fast our fingers just fire off the letters in whatever order and the brain fills in the correct version when we read it back. That's why you can proofread your own writing ten times and still miss it, but a machine that reads letter by letter catches it right away. So the real issue isn't that you're careless, it's that catching your own typos is almost impossible by design. Which is a little scary if you think about it too long.