Anyone You Hear Of

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town the newer streets went up nine houses at a time under one builder, so that whatever he did badly, he did badly nine times over.

Two bell hangers in the town I have never named, the same wire and the same cranks, and the same six shillings for a house put right.
Both finished a job in the same new row on the same Thursday in March.
Both were paid, both were thanked, and both asked the householder to keep them in mind.
One was promised faithfully that she would, and never heard from that row again.
One walked out of the hallway with two house numbers in his pocket book, and had four of the nine by June.
Same row, same wire, same six shillings. What was different about the asking?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Both men hung bells well: the crank screwed into the joist, the wire run true through its pulleys, the little bells above the kitchen door shivering on their springs after they have stopped ringing. The row in question was nine houses put up together, and the builder had taken every upstairs wire round a sharp turn at the stair head rather than set a crank there, a crank costing threepence and a bend nothing. By the third year the nursery bells in all nine were dead, and nine households had privately decided that the bell was simply how it was.

The first man did his job at number seven faultlessly, and at the door said the thing everybody in trade says. If you should hear of anyone wanting a bell hung, he said, you might mention my name. She said she certainly would, and meant it. She was a truthful woman and she did nothing, because nobody wanting a bell hung ever presented himself to her. He had asked her to wait for an event, and such events do not occur.

The second man did the same job at number two, and no better. The difference came at the end. The woman of the house stood at the foot of her stairs listening to her nursery bell answer properly for the first time since she had moved in, and while she stood there he said this. These nine houses went up together, and every one has the upstairs wire taken round that same turn. Which of your neighbours has said anything about a bell that will not answer from upstairs?

She thought for a moment. The end house, she said, where the two boys are, the mother having complained of hers in the summer and been told it was the damp. And number four, where the girl had spent the winter running up to a handle that rang nothing. He wrote the numbers down, then asked whether he might say she had sent him. She said he might.

He called at both the next morning, said he had just put the nursery bell right at number two and that the lady there thought theirs might be the same fault, and was up a ladder inside ten minutes. The other took a week and then had him for the whole house. Each gave a further number to the same question, and by June he had four of the nine.

He was given no more goodwill. He asked a question small enough to answer.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A customer asked to think of anyone will think of nobody; a customer asked about one row of houses and one named fault will hand you a name. The willingness was identical in both hallways. Only the task differed, and the first man set one that no well-disposed person can actually perform.

Consider what you request when you ask to be kept in mind. You are placing a standing order against the whole of somebody's acquaintance, to be filled at an unknown date by an event you cannot describe. To honour it they must notice, in a conversation they cannot expect, that the subject has arisen, recall your name unprompted, and speak up. The second man asked nothing of the future. He asked her to look at nine houses she could see from her step, for one fault she had understood four minutes earlier, and to tell him what she already knew. The first is work and the second is conversation.

The moment matters as much as the wording. He asked while the proof was still making a noise in the house. A letter three weeks later puts the same question to a woman with nothing in front of her, who must summon back the relief before she can be generous with it. I have written on giving people something to say, and this is its other half: you must give them a small occasion for saying it.

Note how the labour was divided. She gave two numbers; he did the calling. Few people will advocate for a tradesman, since advocacy spends their own standing, and almost anybody will tell you a fact about the street. Ask for the fact, and remember afterwards who turned the key, which I have set out on what you owe the person who recommended you.

Two cautions. The first is that narrow must not slide into leading. The question must be as easy to answer with nobody comes to mind as with a number, and if a man must work to get out of it you have charged him for your own job. Nor may you use a name beyond what you were granted; that last question, about whether he might say she had sent him, is not furniture. The second is that the set must genuinely exist. Where your customers have nothing to do with each other, draw it another way: the same trade, the same age of machine, the same awkward month. Do not invent one, since a question built on a connection that is not there is heard for what it is.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What small set can my customer see from where he stands? Not the market, and not the category. Nine houses, four shops on the parade, the men who bought the same machine the same year. Write it down before the next job ends; you cannot compose it on a doorstep.
2. What are my twenty words, and when do I say them? The fault, the set, the question, in that order, while the work is still visible. Words rehearsed once come out level; words invented in a hallway come out as an apology.
3. What am I asking him to do? If it is more than giving a name and his leave to use it, you are asking him to do your work, and he will pay you in promises instead.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same row, same wire, same six shillings. What was different about the asking?

The second man asked a question with a boundary round it. The first asked a favour with no edges and had it granted in full, and could never have collected on it. One went home with a promise about the whole world, the other with two house numbers, and only one of those can be climbed up a ladder.

The verse:

Ask a man to mind you to the whole of his acquaintance,
And he will mean it kindly, and the order stays unfilled.
But name the row, the fault, the week, and stand there in the hallway,
And he will give a number up, and that is how you build.

Until next time. Go and write the twenty words for your own trade, naming one small set and one fault, and ask them at the end of today's job.

P.S. Note which customers give you a name and which a promise, and the names will come from those who stood and watched the work done. A man who merely receives a result has a working bell and no story about it. Do your trying and demonstrating in front of him. It is the only way he acquires something he can repeat.

Also in the archive: The Baker's Thirteenth Loaf, The Mason's Witnesses and Crossing the Square.