Four Inches of Earth

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two plasterers were called to the same parlour in the same week, and both were asked what it would cost to put the wall right.

Two plasterers in one town, the same lime and the same hair.
Both could float a wall true, and both asked two pounds ten.
One took out his knife and told the householder what he found.
One asked first what had been done to that wall before, and when.
The dearer estimate was the one the householder accepted.
Which was which, and what had the asking shown him?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two plasterers, in a town I have never named. Both mixed on the same boards and both could leave a wall so flat you would struggle to find the join. Neither was a fool nor a rogue, which is the only sort of story worth telling.

The trouble was a parlour at the bottom of the hill. The outside wall had gone soft two feet up from the skirting, the paper had lifted, and a white bloom came away on the hand like flour. The householder wanted it right before Christmas, and asked both men to look.

The first came on the Tuesday. He put his knife in below the window and it went into the plaster like cake, and the skirting gave the hollow note. He said, truthfully, that the plaster was perished and full of salt, that patching would only move the trouble along, and that it wanted hacking off to the brick and two fresh coats. Four days and three pounds ten. He had plastered for twenty-two years and had read the wall correctly.

The second came on the Thursday, and before he took his knife out of his bag he asked three things. When was that wall last dry. What had been done about it since. And what happened after it was done.

The answers took four minutes. Three summers ago the wall was hacked off to the brick and rendered again, two coats, by a man she had no complaint of, the work being straight and hard. By the following autumn the bloom was back. She had stood a chest of drawers in front of it since.

Then he asked what else had been done that summer, and she said nothing much, only the garden. The path was laid again with gravel and the border against the house banked up with earth and rotted dung, because her husband had wanted roses.

He went outside and put his trowel into the border. Four inches down he found the slate course, which is meant to stand clear of the ground, buried and wet as a sponge and bridging into the brickwork above. Twelve feet along, the downpipe was spilling onto gravel instead of into its gully.

His estimate was a day with a spade to cut the border back and clear the course, the pipe taken into the gully, a fortnight for the wall to dry, then the hacking off and two coats. Four pounds ten, a pound dearer and a fortnight slower. She took it, and the wall was dry three Christmases after.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Before you tell a customer what you would do, find out what has already been done, by whom, and what happened afterwards. It takes four minutes, costs nothing, and is the part of the job nearly every trade skips to reach the part it enjoys.

Consider what the first man was competing against. Not the second man, whom he never met, but the summer three years ago and an estimate already accepted and paid in full. That is the first reason the question works. A great many of the enquiries that reach you are second attempts. Nobody sends for a plasterer about a wall that was always wet; they send when something that used to be all right has stopped, and often when a repair has been bought once and has not held. In such a house you are weighed less against your rival's price than against a memory, and a proposal that sounds like the thing which failed inherits the fate of the thing which failed.

The second reason is that the history holds the fault and the examination often does not. Your eyes tell you only about the wall as it stands this morning. An account tells you it was dry and then stopped being dry, and anything that was right and went wrong has a date on it, which can be set beside the other things that happened that year. Perished plaster is a symptom with no date in it. A gravel path laid the same summer is a cause with one. It is the discipline of finding out what will decide it before you price, pointed backwards.

The third reason is that the answer tells you where your customer is standing. She believed the trouble was bad plaster, that being the part she could watch going wrong. A man who begins by talking about her husband's rose bed sounds, to a woman in that frame of mind, like a man finding reasons not to do the work. You cannot lead her to the fault until you know where she stands.

The last reason is the plainest. Thoroughness cannot be claimed; a question is thoroughness performed in front of the customer, in the only four minutes she will watch you think.

Two cautions. Never use the history to run down the man who went before. She chose him, and to call him a fool is to call her a poor judge, which she will defend sooner than your diagnosis. He may also have been right, and undone by a gravel path nobody mentioned to him either. Say what has changed since, never who was at fault, and read what being the second man really costs you. The graver caution is that an account is a lead and not evidence. Dates slip badly in the telling, and a house is always remembered better than a garden. Take the account, then go and look with it in your head.

Three questions, and the first you can use before noon tomorrow:

1. When did this last work properly, and what has been done about it since? A date and an attempt, either worth more than your eyes give you in ten minutes.
2. What happened after that was done? Held a year and then failed is a different trade from never worked at all. One says the diagnosis was wrong, the other that it was right and something is still feeding the trouble.
3. What else changed about the place that same year? The cause usually sits inside something nobody believes is connected. A path, a stove, a door that fits too well, a girl answering the telephone instead of you.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which was which, and what had the asking shown him?

The Tuesday man was the one with the knife, and he lost a job he could do perfectly well, at the lower price, by answering the question in front of him instead of finding out which question it was. The asking had shown the Thursday man that his own first answer, the correct one his trade had trained him to give, had already been bought in that house and had already failed. Four inches of earth over a slate course is not plastering, and it was the job.

The verse:

You may be right about the wall
And wrong about the wet.
Ask what was tried, and what came after,
Before you price it yet.

Until next time. Go and write at the head of the page you take enquiries on: what has been done about this before, and what happened after.

P.S. When you have the history, put it in the first line of your estimate in the customer's own words. A customer who reads her own trouble back in your handwriting knows you listened, which no description of your methods achieves, and the figure underneath is compared not with nothing but with money already spent once.

Also in the archive: The Ironmonger's Second Question, Most People Ask Me That and How Are the Hens Laying?