Forty-One Wells

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, out on the high chalk where the water lies deep, two well sinkers worked the same parishes, and the whole difference between them was a sheet of paper that said nothing about either man's work.

Two well sinkers, the same boring rods and the same brick steining.
Both sank sound wells and charged by the fathom.
One took a notice in the county paper every spring.
One printed a sheet each winter that never mentioned his trade.
The farmers read past the notice and kept the sheet in the drawer.
Same trade, same wells, same price. Which man was sent for?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two well sinkers in the town I've never named, working the high chalk to the north of it where water is a serious question. The same gear on the same sort of cart: the shears, the windlass, the boring rods, the lime and the hard brick for the steining. Both knew the smell of the moment the sides begin to weep, and both worked for the farmers and millers of four parishes.

The first man advertised. Every March, three inches in the county paper: wells sunk and deepened, pumps repaired, moderate terms, satisfaction assured, thirty years in the trade. Two pounds a year, every word of it true.

The second man kept a book, begun as a journeyman for his own use, since a sinker who knows his ground guesses less. Every well he put down went into it: the farm, the height of the land, the depth at which water was struck, the ground passed through, and a line added later if it failed in a dry summer.

One winter, having little to do in the dark afternoons, he had the plain facts printed on one side of a sheet. Forty-one wells in four parishes, named by farm, with the height of the land, the depth to water and the strata. At the foot, two lines saying who had sunk them and over what years. No terms, no claim, no satisfaction assured. Two hundred copies, given away to the farmers whose wells were in it, to the land agent and the man who sold pumps.

For a long while it did nothing. Then came a dry season, and a farmer on the high ground watched his pond go down. He did not think about either sinker. He went to the drawer where the sheet was and ran his finger down the column for the farms either side of his own. Twenty-two fathom at the one, twenty-four at the other, both through chalk with flint. So he knew, at his own table and before he had spoken to a soul, that his well would be deep and costly rather than cheap and shallow, and that it could be done at all. Then he read the foot of the sheet and sent for the man named there.

It happened perhaps a dozen times in the years after, and the sheet worked elsewhere besides. The land agent took to quoting it by name, so that strangers twenty miles off heard of a well sinker from a man with nothing to gain, and the county paper took a paragraph from it the summer the springs failed.

Be fair to the first man. His notice was honest and his wells as good. But it said what every sinker's notice said, so a reader had nothing to do with it but get past it. Nobody ever put a newspaper advertisement in a kitchen drawer.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Your records hold facts about your customers' own world that nobody else has troubled to add up, and a plain table of those facts, published under your name, is kept and quoted by people who would never carry an advertisement for you. The difference is direction. An advertisement travels from you towards a man doing his best to ignore it. A useful figure sits still and lets him come and fetch it, and he arrives respecting the hand that counted.

Note what the sheet was not. It was not a claim about his wells. Such a claim is worth making, and an exact figure about your own work is believed where a boast is discounted, but it is a different instrument. The sheet was a fact about the reader's land. It answered the question he actually had, which was never who is the best sinker but how deep is the water under my own field. No man keeps your praise of yourself in a drawer for four years.

Three things follow, and they are the case for the labour. The figure cannot be taken from you, since it cannot be repeated without naming who counted it. A rival may match your price by Friday, but he cannot say forty-one wells unless he has sunk them and written them down, and quoting your sheet he advertises you. It compounds, the eleventh year of the table being better than the first. And it does the hardest part of the selling before you meet, for the farmer was not startled by the price, having done the arithmetic himself, and a sum a man does for himself he believes.

The material is already in your books. What you found when you opened things up, how long jobs took against the reckoning, what failed and after how many years: facts sitting in your own material, waiting for somebody to total them.

Two cautions. The figure must be true and the method stated: the sample, the years, the places. A total with no method behind it is an opinion in a waistcoat, and the first man to check it and find it loose has taught himself to doubt everything else you have written. And it must concern the reader's world rather than your own size, for the number of jobs you have done is a boast with a figure in it, and travels nowhere.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What do I already write down that nobody else has added up? Look in your own books rather than inventing something. The useful total is one you have kept by accident for years.
2. Whose question does it answer? If what it shows is how busy you have been, it is the wrong count. It must be a thing he wanted to know before he heard your name.
3. Where will it live, and who gets it first? Put it where it can be fetched rather than sent, and give it first to the people whose own affairs are in it.

The Answer to the Riddle

The same rods, the same steining, the same price by the fathom, one man taking a notice every spring and the other giving away a sheet that never mentioned his work. Which was sent for?

The second, and not because his sheet was the better advertising. Because it was not advertising at all. It answered the question a farmer puts to himself in a dry summer, so it was kept and quoted by men with nothing to gain, and the name at its foot was the name in the room when the work came up. The first man's notice was read past by those very people, year upon year, and forgotten by dinner.

The verse:

A notice must go out and find the man who will not read it,
A figure he can use will sit and let him come and fetch.
So count the thing you write down anyway and set your name beneath it,
For a table in a kitchen drawer outlives a hundred bills.

Until next time. Go and open your own books, total one thing in them a customer would want to know about his own affairs, and head the table with the number and the years.

P.S. There is a second gift the sinker never planned. A man who has tabulated forty-one of his own jobs prices the forty-second better. His column had taught him that the high chalk wanted deeper work than farmers expected, so he no longer quoted high ground as though it were low.

Also in the archive: The Cutting in the Window, Twenty Boats on One Wall and The Glazier's Hammer.