Both Asked the Same Machine

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town a man wanting counsel had to find somebody who knew him and wait on their convenience, so this one borrows your century and a machine that answers at once.

Two kitchen fitters in one town, the same vans and the same carcasses.
Both were offered the lease of the same small unit at the same rent.
Both sat down on the same Sunday evening and asked the same machine.
Both had a clear answer inside a minute, and the two answers disagreed.
One signed within a fortnight, and one signed for half the money.
The machine was the same machine. What was not?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two kitchen fitters, in the town I have never named, though this time it has electricity in it. Nine years each, the same vans and the same merchant, both working off the drive at home. When the picture framer gave up his unit the landlord offered it to each of them in the same week: a workshop at the back, a window on the street, nine hundred pounds the month on three years. Both wanted it, which is the part to hold on to. Neither was deciding; each wanted agreeing with. Both sat down that Sunday with the machine on the kitchen table.

The first fitter put the figures in and asked whether it was a good idea. The answer came back quickly and in good order. A window makes a trade visible. A workshop gets the cutting out of the weather. A man with premises is taken for a firm rather than a fellow with a van. There was a sober paragraph at the end about the thin months. He read it twice, felt steadier than he had at six, and signed a fortnight later. Nothing in it was false. Every line is true of some kitchen fitter somewhere.

The second fitter typed the same figures and asked for something else. Make the strongest case against taking this, he wrote. Tell me what would have to be true for me to regret it in a year, and name the things I could look up in my own records that would show me which way it falls.

What came back was less comfortable and partly useless, a passage about parking charges among it that did not apply to him. But three objections could be settled out of his own papers, which was their whole value. That a window only pays where the trade is chosen by people walking past. That rent arrives in twelve equal parts while the work does not. That a workshop saves only the time you presently lose, which is a figure a man can count.

So he looked, an hour and a half of it. Of his last forty jobs, thirty-one came from somebody he had worked for or a friend of theirs, six off the website and three off the van. Nobody in two years had walked past something of his and come in. Then his takings, month by month. March to July carried nearly the whole of it and two winter months almost nothing, and nine hundred pounds in a month that brings in nothing is not the nine hundred of May.

He did not drop it. He took the unit at the back of the yard, with no frontage, at four hundred and twenty on a year. What he needed was a dry floor to cut on. The window he had wanted since he was twenty, which is a different sort of want, and it cost four hundred and eighty a month to keep. Both men have premises now, and one pays twice the other for a window nobody walks past.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A machine that answers you will mostly answer in the direction you leaned, because it is built to be useful and useful usually looks like agreement, and because nothing whatever happens to it if you turn out to be wrong. The question you type carries its answer inside it.

Test that before you believe me, since it costs four minutes. Put one decision twice, once as is this a good idea and once as make the strongest case against this. Both answers will be fluent, both true in general, and they will point opposite ways. What you hold is not a judgement but a mirror with a good vocabulary. You will be told the newer machines push back, and some do on a plan plainly poor. But the pull is towards the framing you handed them, and your case will seldom be plain.

Underneath the manner there is a harder fact. Advice is worth what it costs the giver to be wrong, and here it costs nothing at all. The machine will not stand in the yard in February wondering where nine hundred pounds is coming from, and will never hear what happened. Nor does it know your months, your street, or that no customer in forty came off the pavement. In place of knowing you it has the middle of everything ever written about your trade, which for your question is a stranger's average in a friend's tone.

So the verdict at the end is the worthless part, and the part before it worth money. It can hand you the usual ways a small trade taking premises goes wrong, faster than any man you know. Treat it as a list to check, and the checking as the work. The rule is short. Never ask it whether. Ask what would have to be true, ask what to look up, then look it up in your books.

Two cautions. The case against is manufactured on demand exactly as the case for was, so some will not apply and some is nonsense. An objection you cannot settle from your own records is not information, it is furniture, and a man frightened off a plan his figures support has swapped one bad adviser for another. The second runs the other way: this is an evening's work, not a habit. Keep asking and you will be handed objections alarming enough to justify doing nothing.

Three questions, before the next decision you put to a machine:

1. Did I ask it whether, or what to check? Read it back. If it can be answered yes, you wrote it to be agreed with, and you will be.
2. Which objections can I settle out of my own records this week? The rest is weather.
3. What does this adviser lose if I am wrong? Ask it of the machine, the salesman, the encouraging friend. The answer prices the counsel.

The Answer to the Riddle

The machine was the same machine. What was not?

The question. One man asked for an opinion and was given one, having asked a thing that could only be answered kindly. The other asked for the case against himself and where to look, then did the looking, which no machine will do for you. The first bought agreement at nine hundred a month. The second spent an hour and a half with his day book and pays four hundred and eighty a month less for it.

The verse:

The engine on the kitchen shelf replies to what you ask,
And tell me if this plan is sound sets it an easy task.
It pays no rent in February, it never signs a lease,
So ask it what would prove you wrong, and go and look for these.

Until next time. Go and write out the decision you have half made, ask your machine for the strongest case against it, and settle one objection out of your own records this week.

P.S. These machines remember what you have told them. Twenty minutes spent explaining why you want the thing has taught it which way to lean, and the case against then comes back softened to suit you. Start again in a fresh conversation, give it the figures and the trade and nothing else, your enthusiasm left out. You are not asking it to be brave. You are declining to tell it what you want to hear.

Also in the archive: The Half-Page He Did Not Buy, The Fortnight in Pencil and Eight Hundred at Once.