‘That’s a real milestone,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said. He sounded slightly disbelieving about it, which was either appropriate humility or the vestigial anxiety of someone who’d been working toward a thing for so long that success feels suspicious when it arrives. Probably both.
‘What’s driving the December traffic?’ I asked.
‘Holiday gifts,’ he said. ‘People get a new phone, they want their old one wiped and backed up properly before they donate it. People get tablets for their kids, they want parental controls set up properly. People have relatives coming who haven’t been able to get their laptop fixed for six months and suddenly there’s a deadline.’
‘Useful,’ I said.
‘Very useful,’ he said. ‘The repair side is consistent but the setup and consultation side is going to be big in December.’
He talked for a while about the business — the specifics that he’d been figuring out about what people actually needed versus what he’d expected they’d need, the repeat customers he was starting to build, the one slightly terrifying week in November where the used diagnostic tool he’d bought had failed on him and he’d had to figure out a workaround while a customer waited. He was animated in the way he gets when something is working. I’d seen this when he was in his twenties and playing in a band that went nowhere but that he loved; I’d seen it when he’d first started doing informal repairs for friends and kept finding that he could fix things he’d never fixed before.