It began on a temperate afternoon. Not hot, not cold. The sort of day when omens could go unnoticed.

Kale Richards, an unremarkable man by mortal metrics, sat before his glowing screen, poring over the digital static of the early internet. Somehow, through the torrent of pop-up ads, he heard the pleas of the masses.

“Where do I get blinker fluid?”
“Is there a source for a new muffler bearing?”
“I’m having a serious problem with my Johnson rod.”

This wasn’t his concern, he figured, but his heart soon softened. These were not questions. They were confessions. A yearning. A collective need unfulfilled by big autoparts.

Kale searched the far reaches of the internet for what felt like minutes and found nothing. No supplier. No distributor. No catalog of forbidden parts. The void stared back, and Kale Richards blinked only once, but mostly because his room was very dusty.

It was in that moment, simple, unrecorded, and possibly around 4:20 PM, that he received his purpose. Not a vision, not a prophecy, but a calling still the same. The world had turned its back on the drivers who asked too much. Kale would be their answer.

He would bring them parts.
He would bring them clarity.
He would bring them KaleCoAuto.

Much like bargain fast food tacos, what began as a desire became a movement. Then, very briefly, a legitimate tax concern. Word spread. Links were shared. Forums lit up with disbelief and unpaid enthusiasm. KaleCoAuto became the destination for people searching for the question to the ultimate answer.

Orders poured in, some of them real. With each package shipped, more arrived. And with them came a torrent of questions.

“Can I run left-handed brake fluid on a metric car?”
“Does your blinker fluid meet EU standards?”
“Does this look infected to you?”

To manage the chaos, Kale adopted a radical philosophy:
The customer is never right.
It was bold. It was necessary. It was satisfying.
It was the envy of every retail establishment.

Everything was going perfectly.
The site was rebuilt three times.
Not for performance reasons. Just for vibes.

It seemed like the good fortune of KaleCoAuto would never end.
And that’s when it did.

One day, without warning, Kale received an alarming message:
The website was gone.

No error. No foreshadowing. Just digital tire smoke where once there had been broken checkout buttons and duplicated inventory.

Panicked, he dove into the admin panel, only to receive: 500. Internal site error.
His hosting provider confirmed the worst.
Through a perfect storm of malware, expired backend versions, and a terrible, terrible thing called PHP that no one truly understands, the site had become technologically incompatible with existence.

Kale fought. He resisted.
He cleared caches. He clicked links. He reset passwords.
He spent 15, possibly 20 minutes trying to bring it back.

And then he did what any founder with a strong stomach and a weak attention span would do.
He went out for bargain fast food tacos.
And in the haze of sodium, cheap guacamole, and expired sour cream, he forgot all about it.

And so, just like that, it was gone.
Not with a bang. Not with thunderous applause.
Just silence, and an empty domain name, waiting for renewal.

Years passed. The internet moved on. The world changed in small, forgettable ways. Except for the absolutely unbelievably massive ways in which it did, holy crap.

But one night, long after midnight, Kale Richards sat bolt upright on the pull-out-couch, knocking over his extra-large Dr. Pepper.

What if KaleCoAuto was just a Facebook page?

It was an idea as brilliant as it was brainless. A low-effort resurrection. A chance to squeeze some final drops of monetization from a once-popular, largely turgid legacy.

So he made the page. And for a few days, it satisfied.

But something inside him stirred. A whisper. A wheel-bearing hum. Possibly the neighbor’s leaf blower, it’s 6:00 in the morning for God’s sake.
It didn’t matter. The site had to live again.

With new products. Better graphics. Longer descriptions. Slightly improved grammer. And the absolute minimum viable effort required.

Kale did the unthinkable.

He paid for hosting.
He logged into WordPress.
He sat in for a long night of spuddling.
He retreaded the satire.

And just like that, the gears began to turn.
A new chapter had begun.