What she meant by first

Marco fixes garage doors. He has been doing it for ten years, out of one truck, with his cousin Sal riding along on the busy days. Last spring he was at a house replacing a broken spring, and the woman who owned the place came out with a coffee for him. She said he was the first person she called.

He said thanks and kept working. Then she finished the thought. She had called him back in November, when her door froze open overnight and she could see her bikes from the street. He never called her back that day. By the afternoon she had found another company, and that company picked up on the second ring. She only tried him again because her neighbour told her Marco was the one to call.

She was not complaining. She said it the way you mention the weather. That is the part that got him. He finished the job and drove to his next call thinking about the guy who answered on the second ring.

That night he went through his phone. He looked at every call from the last month that he did not pick up. There were nineteen. He called eleven of them back. Four of those he called back the same day. He also found a voicemail from eight months ago he had never played. He played it standing in his kitchen. The man on it sounded cheerful. He said his name, said his door would not close all the way, and said he was trying Marco first because a guy at work spoke highly of him.

A spring runs about $220 with the trip. Both springs and a couple of rollers and you are closer to $400. So nineteen missed calls is somewhere between nothing and four thousand dollars, depending on how many were real. Marco said probably half of them were people calling around for a price. Then he sat with it for a second and said maybe not half. He did not like either number.

The reason he misses calls is not laziness. When the phone rings, Marco is usually up a ladder with a torsion bar in his hands, in a stranger's garage, being paid by that stranger to concentrate. Answering means turning your back on the customer in front of you for one who might not even be real.

So he did not fix it. He made it smaller. He used to return calls at the end of the day. Now he returns them at the end of every job, in the truck, before he pulls out of the driveway. It takes four minutes. Most people hear back from him by two in the afternoon instead of nine at night. Sal answers the phone when he is out with him. Sal is bad at it. He still answers.

It still slips. He missed two calls the week he told me this, and one of those people called twice. And he has no idea what the last ten years of this cost him, because there is nothing to go look at. The jobs he lost never turned into anything. They are not in his phone and they are not in his books. They are just people who needed a door fixed on a Tuesday and got it fixed by somebody else.