Most of it is spent away from the saw: out in the houses measuring rooms and sweeping a bevel gauge through corners, then hauling stock, glue-ups, and finish that has to cure. What's left is five hours at the bench for the joinery, the cuts that decide whether a room holds, and the Bench time clock above is those five hours. The bench is the only place this work can be done right: flat tables, clamps, shop light. No hallway ever offered any of that.

Two to four sections of the room's work, every one of them cut the same. You lay it out once and you cut it once, and that one cut is what all of them are. Delacroix counts the pieces. One good cut can fill four slots on his list. One bad one can lose four.

You look down its length like a rifle barrel: press on the board and sweep your eye to the far end (or tap it, and the look runs itself). If it bends, humps, or twists, it makes a bad joint no matter how well you saw, and it is cheaper to set it aside than to cut it.

This is the part the machine always did for you, and it is the whole reason you are slow here. Hardly any corner in this town is a true ninety: houses settle, framers hurry, mud piles up where the walls meet, and half a degree shows as a gap. The bevel gauge swept in that corner on measure day is lying on the wood, still set, tagged to the room, and it doesn't remember wrong. Two pieces meet in the corner, so the saw takes half of it: drag the saw's table until your two pencil lines come up under the gauge and no light shows along the blade. It will look shut before it is shut, and how much before is your eye, which sharpens all season. Turning the table is free and the first good look is too; getting back down to the blade after that costs a minute each time. The protractor reads the gauge back as a number for two minutes, and some weeks two minutes is a lot.

A needle sweeps the board, leaning across the wood at the exact angle you called in the layout, mirrored on the two pieces, because that is the real geometry of a miter. Tap (or press Space) when it crosses your line: that is the call, and the call decides the cut. Then saw it through: scrub the mouse up and down like a saw (sideways cuts nothing), or keep tapping. Sawing can't move the cut, but it can be forced: race the scrub and the board splits, which costs the board and the call. The green band is where the wall wants the line, and it looks fuzzy at first: that is your eye, and it sharpens as you cut. The needle also slows as the eye comes: a green hand races it, a trained one reads it.

Once the left one is cut, an amber mark appears where you actually put it, and now you have two targets. Land on the green and the pair sits right against the wall. Land on the amber and the two halves meet tight. They are the same place only if your first cut was good. When they aren't, match the amber. A corner sitting a hair off the wall disappears under putty. Two halves that disagree leave a black line at eye level in somebody's dining room for the next thirty years.

An edge only stays an edge for so many feet of wood. When the saw starts pulling, the cut lands a hair off the line you called, no matter how well you called it. Five minutes with the file brings it back. The Ridgeline never dulls. It never teaches you anything, either.

The corners leave this shop glued up as pairs, stain grade under shop light, and the crews install them whole. That is why what fails comes back here instead of getting fixed in the room. A room that comes back means handing the money back and covering the callout on top, and the town hears about it. Nothing that leaves this shop is signed; the corners speak for themselves, and word in town on the board above is what they are saying. The shop costs $120 a week either way, and $300 goes home to your family every Friday, which is the whole reason you are standing here. You came back off the road with $1,200 banked; that is the cushion, and it is the whole cushion. If the word ever goes to nothing, or your debt reaches −$200, the season ends with that week.

The game saves in this browser at the top of every week. Walk away any time; when you come back, you pick it up Monday morning of the week you were in. A refresh mid-week starts that week over.

Eight weeks, then he hands the keys to somebody or signs the shop away, and he is listening for exactly two things: what the town ends up calling you (get to trusted and hold it) and whether your own eye can call a wall without reaching for the protractor. Speed never once enters into it. Neither does the machine, either way: it's the eye behind whatever tool is running.