One head. Four people who need it. And Greg is about to call again.

Four messages from after close. One is a woman whose car wouldn't start last night. She called you at 6:50 PM, then two other shops at 6:51 and 6:53, because that's the speed at which a person alone in a dark parking lot operates. Somebody answered. Her car is on somebody else's lift. It was a starter, plus the battery she got talked into, plus she now has a mechanic, which is a thing people acquire once and keep for eleven years.

A guy searching "mechanic near me" finds you, which is the hard part, and you nailed it. Then your site takes five seconds to load, the photo is of a different shop, the hours block says closed Saturdays (you're open Saturdays), there's no way to request an appointment, and the phone number isn't tappable. He's back on the results page before you'd finish reading this sentence.

Brakes all around on an F-150, arriving as a text because he does not want to have a conversation about pad material. He wants a number and a day. He texted four shops. One replied at 9:36 with a range and an opening Thursday and got the job while you were elbow-deep in a Tahoe. He was never going to call and he was never going to call back.

Ten o'clock never showed. You held a bay and a tech. Nobody confirmed with him, nobody reminded him, and he's quietly decided to do it "next week," a week that has never once arrived for anyone. That bay produced zero dollars for ninety minutes on a day you turned two people away because you were, and this is the word you used, full.

Fourth call about the silver Civic. Greg is not difficult. Greg is not unreasonable. Greg dropped his car at 8 AM and has heard nothing from a human being in six hours and has begun to suspect you have personally stolen it. Each of those calls pulls somebody off something billable. Multiply Greg by the six cars in your shop and you have invented a full-time position that pays nothing and consists entirely of saying "still working on it."

Declined the timing belt in March. Passed on the struts in June. Said they'd come back for the rest, and meant it. Nobody comes back on their own. Every shop in America is sitting on a spreadsheet of pre-sold work that just needs one text, and every shop in America is not sending it, because by 6 PM you are done talking to human beings and everyone in your family knows it.

People get off work at five. That's when they discover the noise, remember the light, or finally have a minute to deal with the thing they've been ignoring since March. The most motivated contacts of the entire day arrive after your doors are locked and go directly into a voicemail box that, be honest with the group, you have not emptied since Thursday.

Clean alternator job. He was thrilled. He told his wife about it in the driveway. He did not tell Google, because nobody asked, so you sit at 4.9 with forty-one reviews while the chain down the street sits at 4.1 with six hundred, does worse work with newer chairs in the waiting room, and outranks you into the sea. You're better and you're losing, and the whole gap is a question nobody asks.