Welcome! You were almost certainly led to this page by a "local search" web site telling you about a shop offering automotive repair services.
Executive summary: That shop closed in 1995, its owner (my father) died in 2013, and the site referring you here has my personal mobile phone number listed as the contact information and likely has an address listed alongside it that was never associated with that business. Please bear in mind that you have no guarantee that the other information on that site is any closer to correct.
After closing his business, my father kept the telephone number (then, as far as I know, unpublished) and PO box billable to his company's name so that he would continue to receive industry publications. His health would not permit him to work, but he liked staying up-to-date on trends, and the field of labor to which he dedicated his life still held his interest.
Some number of years ago (2008, I believe), my father received a very strange phone call including a survey full of innocuous yes/no questions ("Do you like hamburgers?" "Have you ever been to a zoo?"). On the following month's telephone bill, he found a line item for "Web Advertising and Site Design," which confused him because he closed his business long before the World-Wide Web got popular.
So, he called the telephone company to inquire about the charge, and was directed to the company that posted the charge. He called them, and was told that not only had he agreed to these charges, but they had a recording of it!
When he expressed his disbelief, they played back their recording—his "survey" responses (unless you'd believe that "yes, that one in San Antonio" is a sensible response to "And would you like for us to register the domain for you, as well?")! He succeeded in getting the "cramming" charges reversed, but that was only the start of his (and my) grief.
My father spent the last 12 years of his life battling Parkinson's Disease. His mobility was poor, and he moved slowly to avoid falling. After the incident with the "Web Advertising" company, his phone rarely went more than twenty minutes between calls. These weren't business leads; they were advertisements and scams. They were cold calls for pink-sheet stocks, identity theft attempts, callers trying to sell dodgy business services, and some robotic calls with no one on the other end.
For the last few years of his life, I was frequently unable to reach my father by phone because he simply stopped answering it. Most of the calls were wastes of his time that drained his energy as he rushed to answer them.
Please stop for a moment to consider how enraged you would be if you were in my position.
As part of setting up my father's estate, I had his mail forwarded to my post office box in Austin, which must've reactivated all those listings from 2008 somehow. Now, "Garry's Automotive Service" is linked to:
You see, I tried for three years to make the phone calls stop. I get calls for credit card machines, lines of credit for which I've "already been pre-approved," scammers from "Google" (calling from a number well outside of Mountain View) calling to bill me for "web site design" or "fixing [my] business listing on Google Maps," business phishing scams, and all the usual sort of crap that small businesses get. I also get calls from plenty of well-meaning people who really just need a tire changed, a new alternator, a radiator flush, or some other basic automotive service.
I've tried to make these calls stop by contacting the sites who publish this invalid information. Invariably, the response is one of:
Even more maddening is watching the information spread. If I change it at one site, it'll appear at another site. However, if I remove my phone number, the other sites see that information as "incomplete" and happily "correct" it for me!
So, to help ease the madness that's been settling in over the past three years, when I run across a site that allows me to edit the information, but not remove it, I change the phone number to the customer support line, the WHOIS administrative contact number, or whatever other number I can dig up for the site. "Garry's Automotive Serivice" is linked to phone numbers for "local search" businesses in about ten states, so far. Maybe they'll appreciate all the phishing and spam calls more than I have.
I tried to be reasonable, but there's really nothing else I can do. If I change my number (or put some random local number into the profiles), some other poor fellow's going to be stuck with this garbage. At least this way, I'm pointing the confusion and frustration back at the people who keep causing it.
I can only conclude that the entirety of the "local search" economy is a scam. Never pay to be hosted on a fly-by-night "local" search web site. Put up a web site and let Yelp pick you up. If you file for a tax permit, Google, Bing, and Yahoo will probably find you. Put an ad in the yellow pages if you're old-school.
But, seriously, fuck everything about the local search assholes who sent you to this page.
Thanks for reading this,
—Jonathan