The polishing of nascent mRNA by non-templated polyadenylation is an essential quality control step in the lifecycle of mRNA. However, the poly(A)-tail is so much more than a convenient hook to fish out adenylated RNA, or from which to prime cDNA; its shape dynamics across the transcriptome precedes transcriptional changes, adding important contextual information predictive of where cells have been and where they're are going. I will be sharing unpublished data from the redevelopment of our transcriptomic technologies, that bring unprecedented precision, scale, and economy to digital gene expression, alternative polyadenylation and poly(A)-tail length-distributions across the eukaryotic transcriptome. Specifically, I'll be discussing how our new approaches to NGS library prep and analysis can now be applied to answer questions almost 20 years in the making.