Quick fast and cheap

I don't have my own car at the moment. There are 4 drivers in my family and I'll be damned if we can't make do with fewer than 4 cars. My wife has her own car, my younger daughter drives what had been my car, mostly to and from school, and my older daughter has her own car. They range from 3 -7 years old and they're all decent cars, but none of them are my car. The only good side is, I'm the only one trusted enough to drive everyone else's car, so we can usually work it out. My older daughter goes to school in Manhattan, so she leaves her car here and I use it.

My former car, now in the hands of my younger daughter, has had a rough couple of years transporting a teenage driver. It's had its front end significantly repaired after a semi-serious accident, and more recently had a tire torn up, apparently by contact with a fire hydrant (no, I don't know how that happened either) and now, after being parked on a narrow street in Roxborough overnight, it has a dented door and a lot of scratched paint.

At this point, I've had it. I took the car to a body shop and the cheapest they could come up with was $1600, which just ain't happening. I told my daughter I am not really fixing the car until she's gone off to school and is 250 miles away from it. Later that day I drove that car into the city and when I picked it up from the garage one of the attendants (who I've been dealing with regularly for over a year) told me that his brother could fix the car. I said, huh? He told me that his brother fixes the dents that happening the parking lot and that he'd do a good job for a good price. The only other possibility is for me to sand off the cracked paint, spray it with primer, and leave it that way until September.

As enthusiastic I was about the spray paint idea, my daughter thinks it might be too ghetto, so I checked in today again with Moussa, my parking lot friend, and he told me to contact his brother Malik and that he's do a good job for a good price and he'll do it quick.

This violates every rule of production that I've lived by. The world of manufacturing, fixing, shipping, producing, whatever 'ing' you're talking about, is controlled by a triangular diagram. One side says good, one say fast, and one says cheap.  The absolute rule is that you can have any two of those three but not all three. You can get something fast and cheap, but it won't be good. You can get it good and cheap, but you won't get it quickly. Or you can get something good and fast, but it'll cost a fortune. I've seen this play out many times, and the triangle always rules.

So how can I trust this guy? Is it possible I'm about to meet the holder of some great secret? I actually haven't discounted the idea that maybe he could do something quickly for a few hundred dollars that would look better than gray spray paint. In that case, I'd tend to think that the triangle didn't fail- it's just that body shops overcharge horrifically because they deal with insurance companies and have an agreed on set of prices for things. We'll see, I'll keep you posted.