Before He Started the Van

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. I set this one in your own century, the old town having nothing in a man's pocket that would keep a year's work and reckon it up. The difference between these two was half a minute.

Two pest controllers in your own century, the same van, the same powder, the same program.
Both took eight calls a day through a hot August, and both kept their records faithfully.
One filled his in of an evening, after his tea, out of a good memory.
One filled his in at the gate of each house, before he turned the key.
By November the first could not say which advertisement had paid, and the second could, to the pound.
Same calls, same program, same hours. What did the second man have that the first did not?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

August is the wasp month, and in the wasp month a pest controller does not sit down. A nest the size of a football in a loft, another in a cavity above a back door. Both worked the same four parishes and charged within a pound of each other, and both had the same program on the telephone, with three boxes to a job: the source of the enquiry, the time on site, the figure agreed.

The first man filled his in at home, and is not to be sneered at for it. Back at half past seven, his tea, and at nine the telephone on the arm of the chair while he put in the day: three boxes for eight houses, every night but the worst.

Watch him do the fourth house. The source box is open and he cannot call to mind how that woman found him. Most likely the paid directory, he thinks, since he pays for that every month. Time on site: a long job, so he puts an hour, an hour being what a long one takes. It was an hour and twenty-five, and he would have sworn to an hour. Figure agreed: eighty pounds, his price for a loft. He had come down to seventy when she said the second nest had gone, and the seventy was in his tin and not in the box.

Every one of those entries is reasonable. Not one is a lie. Across the season he put in four hundred small reasonable guesses, and the program kept them all with perfect loyalty. In November it was ready for him. The paid directory had brought the most work by a distance, the average job was fifty minutes, the discounting nothing to speak of. So he took the larger plan with the directory and priced the spring at fifty minutes a job.

The second man did the same work and then half a minute more, at the gate. Who sent her, asked at the door and so still in his head. The clock, which the program kept itself if he pressed it at the kerb. And the figure actually agreed, with a word where it had moved: seventy, second nest gone.

By November his program said other things. The free listing on the map had brought more work than the paid directory, and brought it from the two parishes nearest home, which is work with no driving in it. Loft jobs ran to an hour and twenty. And he had given away a hundred and forty pounds at doors, not one of them decided upon, every one now in a line before him.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A record made where the work happened is evidence, and the same record made four hours later is a recollection in the clothes of evidence, and no program alive can tell the two apart. They sit in the same box, in the same figures, and are added up with the same confidence.

The objection to the evening write-up is not that memory is unreliable in some loose, general way. Were the errors random they would wash out over a season. They are not random. Memory errs in a direction, the same direction every night, and a bias repeated four hundred times does not cancel. It compounds.

It leans three ways. To the typical, so every job drifts towards the length that job usually takes and the long ones vanish. To what is top of mind, so an enquiry you cannot place is credited to whatever you are paying for, which is the very thing you were trying to judge. And to your intention, so the price you meant is written instead of the price you said, which makes the one figure that would show what you give away the likeliest of all to be wrong.

Hence the first man's winter. He did not arrive at no answer, which would have been harmless, but at three confident answers, each wrong in the direction that costs money: spend more on what you already spend on, price as though every job is short, believe you never discount. His program gave back the shape of his own memory, which is what your tools do and seldom confess to, since they count what happens to you and record nothing that you do.

The cure is not a better evening habit. There is a fourth lean in that habit, worse than the rest: it is skipped when the day has run long, and the long days are the busy ones, so the record thins exactly where the trade is thickest. Move the writing to where the facts still are, and make it small enough to happen: three boxes, at the gate, before the van moves. The van is the point. A thing hung on an action you already take without fail gets done; a thing hung on good intentions at nine at night does not.

Two cautions. A box is not paid for once but four hundred times, and the fourth box is what stops a man filling in the first three, a short form being harder to design than a long one, as the upholsterer found. And do not improve old figures from memory, which launders guesses into evidence. Note the date you began recording properly and compare like with like from there.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. Which three facts, had I them honestly, would change a decision? For most trades: where it came from, how long it truly took, what was agreed. A box that changes nothing costs you the boxes that would.
2. At what exact moment will they be written? Not what day. What moment, tied to something you already do without thinking: at the gate before the key, at the bench before the tool goes down.
3. Which figure am I working to that was remembered rather than recorded? Your average job length and your best source of enquiries are the most commonly guessed and the most costly to guess at. Watch one properly for a fortnight. You may find your price built on a time you never measured.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same calls, same program, same hours. What did the second man have that the first did not?

Facts rather than recollections, bought for half a minute at a gate while the house was still in front of him. A good memory gave the other man a tidy record of a season that never quite happened, and he spent real money on it.

The verse:

At nine o'clock he filled it in, and filled it in with care,
But the loft had shut behind him and the woman was not there,
The other wrote it at the gate in half a minute flat,
And knew by winter what he charged, and what it cost, and that.

Until next time. Go and fix the moment at which your three facts get written down, and write them standing where the work was.

P.S. When you ask how a customer came to you, an honest I cannot remember where I saw you is a finding in itself, and should be written down as that. A season of them tells you that you are found by slow accumulation and not by any one advertisement, and the man who tidies such answers into a named source is the man who cancels what was working.

Also in the archive: The Screen As It Came, Nine Seconds and Sixteen Miles and The Fortnight in Pencil.