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The text went out before most callers had put the phone down.

Missed calls at a roofing and construction company in northern New Jersey that looked like a person got a text from the company's own number. We timed all of them, September 9 – October 14, 2026.

What we measured

For each text-back we took the moment the call ended from the phone line's records and the moment the text was sent from the desk's log. 58 of the 77 went out within a minute of the hang-up. 25 arrived while the caller was still on the line, usually listening to the voicemail greeting.

Counted from the moment the phone started ringing instead, the median is 61 seconds. That is the honest version of "within a minute": about half the time, a little over.

Then the conversation

A text only matters if someone answers the reply. In the same five weeks, real people wrote back in four conversations and sent 12 messages that needed an answer. The desk answered all 12. The median wait was about 80 seconds; the longest was 2 minutes 13 seconds.

One of those conversations started at 6:48 on a Saturday evening. The caller turned out to be in California. The desk said plainly that the company works in New Jersey, instead of promising a visit nobody would make, and left it for the office to decide whether to call back.

What went wrong once

On September 15 the phone line ran out of prepaid texting credit. For about a day, 23 callers got their first text late, the slowest by roughly 24 hours. One of them was a homeowner with a leak, who still replied within a minute of the late text and was handed to the office the same morning. The desk now warns the owner the same day the credit runs out. Those 23 late texts are not in the 77 above.

Where the numbers come from. Desk log and lead ledger on the company's instance, plus call and message timestamps read from the phone line, September 9 – October 14, 2026. Texts sent before the desk went live, test sends, and the 23 late texts are excluded from the timing. Reply times are from the four conversations with people who were not vendors or robo-dialers.