Everything but the Name

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town a man wanting advice walked to the far end of the market and asked quietly, knowing the advice was free and the listening was not. Your century has put a listener on every bench, and it answers so promptly that nobody asks where the words go.

Two bathroom fitters in your own century, the same vans and the same white tile.
Both began in the same March with the machine that answers questions, at nothing a month.
Both used it on a Sunday to turn a rough survey into a proper schedule of works.
One typed the survey in as he had written it, name, address and the key-safe number.
One typed the same job in with every particular taken out, and got the same schedule back.
Same trade, same machine, the same answer. What did the second man keep that the first gave away?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

The trade is bathrooms. A survey done in a cold room with a torch, measuring a floor that is not level and tapping a wall to learn what is behind it. The notes go in a damp book on the van bonnet: the householder, the address, the mornings she is in, where the key is kept, what the surveyor said about the joists, and a figure she would rather her sister did not hear. Out of that a schedule of works must be made.

The first fitter found the machine in the March and thought it a small miracle, which it is. On the Sunday evening he photographed four pages of survey notes, dropped them in, and asked for a schedule and a letter to the householder. Out came both, in eleven seconds, better ordered than anything he had written in nine years. He did the same every Sunday after.

By the next March he had put near three hundred households through it: names, addresses, telephone numbers, the hours each house stands empty, where the key hangs. None of it came back to haunt him. That is the part worth sitting with. Nothing happened.

What happened was smaller and later. He took a man on in the June and gave him the account, and the man did likewise, only faster. Then a housing trust put twenty bathrooms out to tender and asked, on one line of a form, where the particulars of its tenants would be held and who could read them. He read it four times. He could not answer it, not because the answer was damning but because he had never asked the question, and a man who has not asked it cannot invent a true answer in an afternoon. He left the line blank.

The second fitter began in the same March and spent twenty minutes first. He wrote three lines and taped the sheet inside the cupboard door. The machine gets the job. The machine never gets a name, an address, a telephone number, a key number or a figure out of a bank. Where a particular is needed, it goes in as a description.

So his Sunday question began: a nineteen-twenties semi, ground floor cloakroom, cast iron soil pipe at the rear, floor out by eleven millimetres across two metres. Then the work itself. The schedule came back in eleven seconds, no worse than the other man's, because the machine had never needed the woman's name to know that the plumber goes before the tiler.

He did one other thing that March, in nine minutes. He read what the account said it did with the words typed into it, and turned off the setting that let them be used for improving the thing. When the housing trust sent its form, he answered the line in two true sentences.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

The machine that answers you is not a drawer in your own workshop, it is a counter in another man's shop, and a particular laid on that counter has left your premises for good. The rest of this letter follows from that one fact of geography.

Consider what you have done when you type a thing in. You have sent it to a building you have never seen, where it is kept under terms you have not read, where a person checking answers may look at it, and where, on the free accounts, it may be used to improve the thing itself. None of it is hidden. It is the ordinary bargain by which a remarkable tool is given to you for nothing. The trouble is that you did not know you had struck it, and the particulars were never yours to trade.

And you cannot take it back. A letter sent in anger can be begged off the postmaster. A thing typed in has no return journey. It is the hard fact of records kept only on a screen, which are on loan rather than in your possession, turned about: there, what you cannot get out hurts you, and here, what you cannot get back does.

Now the part that settles it. The particulars add nothing to the answer. The machine does not know your customer and can do nothing with her name but print it out again. Take out the name, the number and the address, and the schedule comes back identical. Worth marking, that, since nearly every caution in trade costs you something in speed or money or chances missed. This one costs twenty minutes once and nothing after, being not an extra step but a habit in how a question is phrased. A man might fairly say the risk is small. But a remedy priced at nothing makes the size of the risk beside the point.

Two cautions. Do not swing the other way and refuse the machine. The first fitter was not wrong to use it, only careless about what he fed it, and a trade that will not use the tool loses more than it saves, the more so since the thing has no stake in your being right and wants your judgement over it. And keep the rule to three lines. Two pages in a folder go unread by the man you take on in June, and that man is how this goes wrong.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What have I typed in this month that I would not have read aloud in the queue at the post office? Look at the last ten things you asked. They are kept, which is awkward in one direction and useful here.
2. Who else uses these machines in my name, and what have they been told? If nobody has told them anything, you have no rule. You have a personal habit, and it leaves when you do.
3. Which particulars does the question actually need? Ask it of the next thing you type. The answer is nearly always none.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same trade, same machine, the same answer. What did the second man keep that the first gave away?

His customers' particulars, and with them his right to say where they were held. Both asked a question. Only one handed over a record while he was about it, and he did it without noticing, because the machine took both in one breath and charged for neither.

The verse:

The question is yours and the answer is cheap,
But the name on the page is another's,
And a word laid down on a stranger's counter
Is a word you will never get back.

Until next time. Go and write the three lines today, where the work is done: what the machine gets, what it never gets, and how a particular is described on the day it must go in.

P.S. The photograph is the quiet hole in every rule of this kind. A man who would never type an address will photograph a surveyor's report and drop the picture in without a thought, and it carries the name, the address and the signature at the foot. Decide the same about photographing as about typing, or you have decided nothing.

Also in the archive: The Copy He Never Needed, Both Asked the Same Machine and The One Name He Never Cut.