And What Is It You Do?

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, at the harvest supper, where a stranger at the long table turns to the man beside him and asks the question everybody asks.

Two slaters sit at supper's board,
Both asked the question, both restored:
And what is it you do, my friend?
One names his trade. The talk is at an end.
One names the leak, the winter, and the wife.
Whose answer found him work for life?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two slaters in the town I've never named, and their roofs, in the old chorus, were equally tight. Both sat down at the same harvest supper, at the same long table, beside strangers from the next parish, and both were asked the question a stranger asks.

And what is it you do?

The first said: I am a slater. Which was true, and complete, and finished the matter. The stranger said ah, and nodded, and reached for the bread, because there is nothing a person can do with the name of a trade except file it. He had no roof leaking that evening and so he had no use for a slater, and the conversation moved on to the weather, and the slater's answer went where such answers go, which is nowhere at all.

Notice what the answer asked of the stranger. It asked him to work out, unaided, whether a slater was any use to him, when he had never thought about slating in his life and had no reason to start over the pudding.

The second slater, asked the same question at the same table, said something that took four seconds longer.

I mend the roofs on the old cottages round here, mostly the ones that let the damp in over the bedroom every winter, so that the wife stops putting the bucket out.

The stranger laughed, because he knew that bucket. And then he said the sentence that the first slater never heard from anybody, which was: my sister has exactly that. And a name and a village were written on the back of a hymn sheet, and the sister's roof was done by Michaelmas, and the sister's neighbour's the spring after.

Mark what the second answer did. It named the sort of house, so the stranger could picture it. It named the trouble, in the words a householder uses rather than the words a slater uses. It named the season, which is when the trouble is felt. And it named the small domestic misery at the end of it, the bucket on the bedroom floor, which is the part a person remembers and repeats, and which turns a stranger's polite question into a search of his own acquaintance for somebody with a bucket.

The two men had the same trade and the same skill, and one of them had an answer that could be passed on and the other had a noun.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

The name of your trade tells a stranger nothing they can act on. Name the trouble you mend, and for whom, and they will search their acquaintance for it. Every day somebody asks what you do, and almost every trade answers with a job title, which is the least useful answer available: it can be nodded at and it can be filed, and that is the whole of what can be done with it.

The better answer has a shape, and the shape is always the same. Who you do it for, in a way that can be pictured. What goes wrong for them, in their words rather than yours. And the small human consequence at the end, which is the part that gets remembered and repeated. I mend the roofs on the old cottages, the ones that let the damp in over the bedroom every winter, so the wife stops putting the bucket out. Nothing in that is clever. All of it can be carried home and said to a sister.

And note who the answer is really for. Not the stranger, who probably has no leak. It is for the stranger's sister, his neighbour, the man he works with, none of whom are at the table, and all of whom he will now think of, because you gave him a picture to match them against. The referral letter said that a request for anybody is a request for nobody. This is the same lesson one step earlier: a description of anybody is a description of nobody, and the specific one does the searching for you.

Two cautions. Keep it to one breath, since an answer that runs to a paragraph is a speech, and people flinch from speeches at supper. And say it plainly rather than cleverly, because a cute phrase invites admiration and a plain one invites the sister. The bucket is not a joke. It is the exact thing the sister has.

Three questions, and say the answers aloud before you write them:

1. What do you say now? Say it. If it is your job title or your firm's name, you have been answering the commonest question in your trading life with the answer that produces nothing.
2. What is the bucket? The small daily misery your customers actually feel, in the words they use for it. Not the technical fault: the thing they complain about to their sister. That is the last five words of your answer.
3. Could the stranger repeat it? Say your new sentence to somebody who does not know your trade, then ask them an hour later what you do. If they cannot say it back, it is still too much about you and not enough about the bucket.

The Answer to the Riddle

Whose answer found him work?

The man who named the bucket. Both slaters were asked the same question by strangers with no leaks of their own, and one of them gave the stranger a noun to nod at, while the other gave him a picture to carry home and hold up against everybody he knew. The trade was the same. The roofs were the same. One answer ended the conversation and the other one started a search, and the search found a sister, and the sister found a neighbour, and none of it would have happened had he said I am a slater and reached for the bread.

The verse:

Say what you are, and watch them nod,
And reach for bread, and talk of rain.
Say who, and what goes wrong, and when,
And they will think of someone's roof.

Until next time. Go and write the one-breath answer, with the bucket at the end of it, and use it the very next time somebody asks.

P.S. The same sentence belongs at the top of your page, on the side of your van, and in the mouth of whoever answers your telephone. If you have got it right at the harvest supper, you have got it right everywhere, since the stranger at the table and the stranger on the pavement are asking the identical question and have the identical amount of patience for the answer.

Also in the archive: Your Sister on the Lane, The Nine Headlines and Three Names on the Wall.