This past week, I was staying at a rented house in Austin. Whenever I rent a house in the city of our company headquarters, I like to have the core Leverage team over for dinner.  I consider myself a pretty good cook, and I got my bragging rights from cooking alongside Emeril Lagasse on his show “Emeril Green.” Through my experience, I’ve become fairly proficient at cooking for large groups. I have some go-to recipes I can cook blindfolded that please a majority of the crowd the majority of time. At the rental house, I found something a little alarming: the grill there was made by the same company that makes vacuums. As anyone who cooks frequently will tell you, the degree of difficulty goes up an order of magnitude when not using your own equipment, especially shoddy equipment. I certainly missed my grill while cooking up that dinner.

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