I turned it off on a Tuesday.
Not because it broke. I just decided I wanted to take a step back and look at what we had built. Seemed reasonable at the time.
First day, nothing. Second day, nothing. I started thinking I had made a bigger deal of it than it was.
Then Thursday a property manager called. Guy we had quoted eight months back. I went to pull the file and I could not find it. Not because it was gone. I just did not know where it lived anymore. The agent had been pulling that stuff for so long I had stopped keeping track of where anything was.
That was the first one.
By Friday morning I had found three more.
There was a crew channel I had not checked in six weeks. The agent was summarizing it every morning so I never looked at the raw feed. Turns out two of my guys had been posting updates in there. There was a scheduling conflict from four days before I shut it down. It had worked itself out. I still do not know how.
Insurance certs, sub agreements, all that paperwork. I knew it was in Drive. Could not tell you which folder. I had asked the agent to pull those documents probably forty times. Never once had to remember the path myself.
Three open leads in a follow-up sequence. Just running. No notifications. I did not know they were there until I dug through the logs after the fact.
Everything got handled. I want to be clear about that. Nothing actually fell apart. But I had been walking around for two days thinking the shutdown went clean and it had not.
Here is the thing I keep coming back to.
I have an electrician who has worked my jobs for four years. He knows my sites better than I do at this point. Knows which panels are labeled wrong, knows my preferred rough-in sequence, knows which inspectors in which jurisdictions like what. If he walked tomorrow I would lose two weeks just trying to figure out what was living in his head.
The agent was the same problem. I just never thought about it that way because it was software.
When something works, you stop looking at it. You stop writing things down. You just let it run. And then the day it is gone you find out how much of your operation was actually stored inside it instead of somewhere you could get to yourself.
I am putting it back together this weekend.
But before I do, I am documenting everything it was doing. Every folder path. Every routing rule. Every follow-up sequence. Not because I am planning to shut it down again. Because I do not want to be standing in my office next Thursday not knowing where my own files are.
I needed one document. That is how I found out what turning it off had cost me.