Last week one of my regular clients asked me to contact her tenant, a young man living on Capitol Hill, to fix his reportedly broken deadbolt. I emailed him immediately and got no reply. My client asked me a few days later for the status of the repair. I reached out to the tenant again, this time by text and phone. When I finally got him on the line he told me, “Listen, I really don’t think I need a locksmith for this. I’m not locked out. The lock is just broken.”

It made me think of a phone call I had several years ago. Once every six months or so I get a call from a 25-year-old in Arizona who has just been assigned to be my Yelp account rep. Every time the call goes pretty much the same way. They tell me how much better my life will be if I pay Yelp for advertising. I tell them that I’m just one guy and I’m at capacity without advertising. Then they’ll suggest I take on some employees–basically restructure my business and my life–to increase my capacity and create a reason to buy ads from Yelp. Inevitably they ask how I’m getting my business now. One time when I told the new girl assigned to selling advertising to locksmiths in Puget Sound that I get a lot of my business from regular customers, she snorted and said, “What…like…you’ve got customers that lock themselves out on a schedule?”

I also didn’t know things when I was 25.