the whole bottom layer was just mush" - did you check for any moisture getting in through the bottom before you moved them?

Yeah, you're mixing up the terms a bit. Slicing across the grain usually means cutting perpendicular to the muscle fibers in meat, not onions. For onions, what you're describing is cutting pole to pole (through the root end) which keeps the layers intact and gives you those nice long strips that hold up in cooking. Slicing across the equator gives you rings that fall apart more easily.

What blows my mind is nobody ever talks about the temp swing in the building throwing your tram off. Walked into the shop one morning at 6am and it was 62 degrees, by 2pm the concrete slab had heated up enough to shift the whole machine base a couple tenths. Checked it with a sweep and sure enough, the bubble on the level was actually moving as the day went on.

Did a friend of mine fall for this same trick last month? He got a "FedEx package delivery" text with a tracking link that looked almost identical to the real one, clicked it, and ended up with a fake login page for his email. Took him two days and a call to his IT guy at work to clean up the mess.

My friend told me their office switched crews three times before finding a local team that didn't swap people, just like you said @the_betty.