I once drove a car with a shattered windscreen for three weeks and I told myself the wind would not blow it in. I was a young man and I was a foolish man and I believed that my lack of money made the glass stronger. It did not. The glass bowed and the wind whistled and I eventually had to admit that the road was harder than my pride.

I had spent twenty-one days performing a visual inspection I was not qualified to conduct and I had risked my eyes to save a handful of notes. My nose is tight and I have sneezed seven times this morning and I find I have very little patience for the lies we tell ourselves about safety. We look at a crack and we become experts in things we do not understand.

The Driveway Glass Engineer

The sun is low over Parramatta and the air is sharp. Tuan stands in his driveway and his coffee sits on the roof of his white sedan. The steam rises from the cup and vanishes in the cold. Tuan is crouching. He is forty-two years old and he is an accountant but this morning he is a glass engineer.

He looks at a line on his windscreen. The line is three centimetres long and it has a small center like a star. Tuan tilts his head to the left and he tilts his head to the right. He is trying to see if the light passes through the line or reflects off it. He wants to know if the crack has reached the inner layer of the laminate. He has no tools and he has no training and he has only the feeling in his gut.

Tuan takes his phone from his pocket and he takes a photograph. The flash fires and the reflection of the phone hides the crack. He looks at the digital image and he sees a blur. He deletes the photo and he tries again. He moves his head sideways to see where the light catches the line and he decides he will look at it again tomorrow.

He thinks the light will be better tomorrow. He thinks he will know more when he has slept. This is the ninth consecutive morning Tuan has performed this ritual and the crack has not changed but his anxiety has grown. He is performing an assessment on the only evidence available and that evidence is a feeling of dread.

More Than Just a Window

The road is a place of high pressure and the glass is a structural component of the vehicle. People think the windscreen is a window but it is a brace. It holds the roof up when the car rolls and it provides the surface for the airbag to strike. When the glass is compromised the car is compromised.

We sit in our driveways and we tell ourselves that the line is not in the field of vision. We tell ourselves that it is not near the edge. We make these rules up because we want to be right and we do not want to be sold something. We treat the windscreen like a scab that will heal if we do not touch it.

We read this indecision as a financial choice. We think the driver is putting off a bill and we think they are waiting for payday. This is often a mistake. It is an information decision and it is a strange one. The information is nearly free and the answers are available. A technician can usually tell from a photograph and a brief description whether a chip is repairable or whether the car needs a full replacement.

The reason drivers do not send that photograph is that they experience the act of asking as a commitment. They think the phone call is a trap. They think the click of a button is the start of a process they cannot stop. People would rather stay uncertain for free than become informed at the apparent risk of being sold to.

They fear the funnel. They fear the aggressive follow-up and they fear the pressure of a salesperson who smells a lead. So they stay in the driveway and they crouch in the cold and they use their thumbnail to feel the edge of the glass. They think they are saving themselves from a hassle but they are only inviting a catastrophe. The gap between how cheap information is to supply and how expensive it feels to request is where the danger lives.

The Seed Analyst’s Perspective

“The smallest fracture is just a map of where the energy will go next.”

– Liam H., Seed Analyst

Glass does not forget where it was hit. The energy stays in the fracture and the heat of the Sydney sun expands the air inside the chip. The cold of the night contracts the frame of the car. The glass moves and the line grows and the repairable chip becomes a ruined pane. Tuan does not know this and he only knows that the line looks the same as it did on Tuesday. He does not see the map of the energy.

Friction in the Western Suburbs

In the Western Suburbs the trucks move all night. They carry freight down the M4 and they carry gravel along the M5 and they throw stones like small bullets. A stone hits a windscreen at eighty kilometres an hour and it creates a localized failure. If the driver is a fleet operator they cannot afford to ground the vehicle.

They cannot sit in a driveway for nine mornings and they cannot wonder if the glass is safe. They need the vehicle in service and they need it earning. The mobile technician is the answer to this friction. The technician travels to the home or the office or the depot and they do the work where the car sits.

The most valuable thing a service can offer is not a lower price but a way of asking that does not feel like a commitment. When the barrier to entry is lowered the safety of the road is increased. We need to stop pretending that we are experts in tension and laminates. We need to stop using our thumbnails as measuring tapes.

The coffee on Tuan’s roof is cold now. He picks it up and he takes a sip and he grimaces at the bitterness. He gets into the car and he drives to work and he tries not to look at the line. He focuses on the tail lights of the car in front of him.

He is worried about mobile auto glass replacement and the time it will take out of his day. He thinks he will have to go to a workshop and sit in a plastic chair and drink bad water from a cooler. He does not realize that the workshop can come to him. He does not realize that the transaction can be as simple as the question.

We sit on symptoms and we sit on legal questions and we sit on strange noises in the wall because we have framed the act of asking as an entry into a sales funnel. This is a failure of the way we build businesses. If the customer feels that a question is a contract they will stop asking questions. They will wait until the noise is a scream and they will wait until the chip is a web. They will wait until the choice is taken away from them. This is how we live and it is a hard way to live.

The Water is Coming

The Sydney basin is a place of movement. People drive from the growth suburbs in the west to the towers in the east and they drive from the bush in the south to the coast in the north. The windscreen is the only thing between the driver and the elements. It is a thin sheet of glass and plastic and it is under constant stress.

When we ignore a chip we are ignoring a structural flaw. We are like the people who see a crack in a dam and decide it is only a cosmetic issue. We are wrong and the water is coming. I have sneezed again and my head aches but I know one thing clearly. The person who looks at their windscreen at seven in the morning is not looking for a price.

They are looking for permission to stop worrying. They want someone to tell them what the line means. They want the uncertainty to end. If we make the ending of that uncertainty easy we make the road safer for everyone. L&M Windscreens understands this because they move to the customer. They remove the friction of the workshop and they remove the friction of the wait. They provide the answer in the place where the question was asked.

The sun is higher now and the glare is hitting the glass. Tuan is on the motorway and the crack is glowing. It looks like a spark. He wonders if it is getting bigger or if the light is just different. He will wonder this again at lunch and he will wonder this again when he drives home in the dark.

He is an unqualified assessor and he is tired of the job. He wants to be an accountant again. He wants to look at numbers that balance instead of lines that threaten to break.

If you find yourself crouching in the driveway you have already admitted that there is a problem. You are just waiting for someone to give you a way out that does not feel like a trap. The glass is patient but the road is not.

The vibration of the engine and the bump of the curb are all working on that small star in the center of your vision. You can keep your coffee on the roof and you can keep your head tilted at an angle but the physics of the glass will not change.

You only have to be a person who knows when to stop guessing. The answer is closer than the next nine mornings.