Eight Hundred at Once

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town no man could put the same words into eight hundred houses before breakfast, so this one borrows your century and a van with a screen in it.

Two carpet fitters in one town, the same gripper rods and the same van.
Both kept eight hundred and forty old customers in the same program.
Both wrote the same note about stair runners on the same wet Tuesday.
Both sent it, and one of them sent it twice.
By Friday one had eleven jobs and the other nineteen apologies to write.
Which of them sent it twice, and who received it the first time?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two carpet fitters, in the town I have never named, though this time it has telephones in it. The same gripper rods in the same van, eleven years each at the trade, and the same eight hundred and forty old customers apiece, copied off job sheets into the same cheap program. That is a better list than most trades keep.

January is thin in carpets, since people lay a carpet before Christmas and not after. So both men had the same idea in the same wet week: a short note to every old customer about stair runners, with a figure in it. Neither wrote a bad note.

The first fitter was careful by his own lights. He read it twice on the Monday evening, moved two commas, and sent it to all eight hundred and forty a few minutes past nine. Two things were wrong. The price said twelve pounds the square metre, a figure typed in to hold the space while he looked out an invoice, and never corrected. He had meant from twenty-two. And the note opened with Dear and then a first name fetched from the records, except that near a third of his records had none, having come off job sheets giving a surname and a door number. A good part of the county read a note beginning Dear comma.

What followed was not ruin. It was a fortnight of apologising. Nineteen people took him up on twelve pounds the square metre, the figure standing in writing over his own name. He fitted three at that price and made nothing, and to the other sixteen he wrote the letter in which a tradesman explains that his own advertisement was a mistake. He could call none of it back: thirty seconds past nine the note sat in eight hundred and forty pockets, and no cart follows it.

The second fitter was duller about it. Before he sent it anywhere he sent it to himself, then read it on his telephone out in the van, where his customers would read it. He saw Dear comma inside four seconds and the twelve pounds a moment later. So he mended the price, took the first name out and began with Good morning, which is weather-proof. Then he sent it to ten customers he had fitted for twice. One rang to ask whether the price took in the landing as well as the flight, which told him the note was unclear where he could not have seen it himself. The rest went out at four. Eleven jobs by Friday, for twenty-five minutes of extra labour.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A machine does the wrong thing at precisely the speed it does the right thing, and the friction that used to stop you at the third copy has been taken out and thrown away. The reach, the speed, the eight hundred at once: a tool gives all of it to your mistake as readily as to your good sense, holding no opinion about which it carries.

Consider how this used to be governed, because it was governed, and not by carefulness. A man writing eight hundred notes by hand finds his error at the third one, and the loss is two sheets of paper. The slowness was an inspection built into the work, paid for whether he wanted it or not. And no printer ever ran six hundred handbills without pulling one sheet first for the counter, not out of caution but because the press made the cost of being wrong six hundred times too plain to ignore.

Your machine pulls no proof. The old inspection has not been improved upon, it has been deleted, and you must now put it back by hand every time. The first fitter was not careless; he read his note three times. But he read it on the screen he had written it on, which is the one place a man cannot see his own work. Reading a thing over is not a proof. A proof is the real article, arriving the real way, looked at with your own eyes before anybody else has one.

Nor do these actions come back. A note read has been read, and a record written over in four hundred places is gone unless you hold a copy you could take out again. Handwork can mostly be undone: scraped, planed, picked out, done again. A bulk action only feels like that sort of work, until the moment it does not. The proof, meanwhile, costs the same whatever the size of the job, twenty-five minutes for eight hundred names or eight thousand, while the damage grows with every name you add. It is the same reason a man fills in his own enquiry form out in the yard once a year. What you build is only ever tested by strangers, which is to say at your expense.

Two cautions. The first is that a proof of one proves the shape of a thing and not its contents. Sending the note to yourself catches Dear comma only if your own record is a bad one, and a fault in a third of your records slips past a single sample two times in three. So do not proof the record you know best but the oldest and thinnest, copied off a job sheet in your first year. The second caution runs the other way. Twenty-five minutes is a proof, but three weeks of nerves is not, and a man too wary to write to his own customers has arranged a certain small loss to avoid an unlikely larger one.

Three questions, before the next thing you send to everybody at once:

1. Have I held this in the form a stranger will get it? Not read it over where you wrote it. Received it, on the telephone, standing where your customer stands.
2. How many does this touch, and what if it is wrong? One is a conversation and eight hundred is a fortnight of apologies. Anything that writes over records wants a copy kept first.
3. Which of my records is likeliest to be wrong? Every list has a bad quarter and you know where it sits. Proof against your worst record and the rest follows.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of them sent it twice, and who received it the first time?

The second fitter, and the first man to receive it was himself, out in the van with his telephone in his hand, four seconds from the two faults that cost his rival nineteen apologies. He pressed the same button his neighbour pressed. He simply pressed it once before it mattered.

The verse:

The press that prints six hundred sheets
Will pull you one for free;
The engine on your kitchen shelf
Pulls none, unless you see.

Until next time. Go and send the next thing you write to your customers to yourself first, and read it on your telephone before anybody else has it.

P.S. A word on the things that send themselves. A proof pulled in January is a proof of a message that may go on leaving your premises every Tuesday for three years, to people who never met you. Proof it again whenever anything near it moves: a price, a telephone number, a service you no longer offer. The message that embarrasses a trade most is rarely the one somebody sent. It is the one nobody sent, because nobody remembered it was still going.

Also in the archive: Sent in His Name, The Message Nobody Missed and Two Bars of Signal.