Nine Seconds and Sixteen Miles

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. I am told that in your century a man may carry four years of his trade on one screen, and still not lay a hand on a job he did himself.

Two glaziers in your own century, the same van and the same two towns.
Both kept every job on the same screen, photographs, sizes and quotes alike.
One let the machine name the files as it pleased, and filed them by year and month.
The other spent twenty minutes settling one rule for how a file should be named.
Four years on a householder rang wanting the glass her neighbour had, and neither remembered the job.
One of them had it before she was off the telephone. Same trade, same records. How?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two glaziers, in a town much like the one I have never named, though set in your century rather than mine. Each worked out of a van, ordered his units off the same works and fitted them himself, photographing every job and quoting out of the same program. By the fourth year each had four thousand jobs on a screen.

The first was the tidier man. He kept a folder for each year and one for each month inside it. What he did not do was name anything. Photographs arrived off the camera with a number against them. Quotes came out of the program called quote, then quote again, then quote final, then quote final two. His system could be told in one true sentence. Everything is in the month it happened.

The second did one thing differently, in his first week, sitting in the van with the rain on the roof. He asked what he would be holding if he came looking for a job in five years. A surname, a street, a year give or take one, and a rough word for the thing. So he settled a rule in twenty minutes. Every file begins with the date in figures, then the surname, then the street, then what the thing is, in that order and always.

Then came the telephone call. A householder in a hurry, wanting the obscured glass her neighbour had in the bathroom. You did it for her some years back, she said, the one with the little squares.

The first searched his box for bathroom and got nothing, then for obscured and got nothing, the machine having never been told either word about those files. So he guessed at a year, opened the months one by one, and scrolled photographs of other windows until the afternoon was half gone. Unable to read a size off a picture, he drove the sixteen miles out with a tape to measure the neighbour's window instead.

The second typed the surname into the box. One file came back in under ten seconds, named with the date, the surname, the street and the words bathroom obscured unit, holding the pattern, the sizes and the price charged at the time. He quoted that afternoon from his chair, and wrote a line no other glazier could write. The same glass as next door, fitted in the March of such a year.

Be fair to the first man. By every visible sign he was the better ordered, his van cleaner, his folders consistent. His trouble was not untidiness. He had stored four thousand jobs by when they happened, the one thing nobody remembers.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A machine can find nothing it has not been given words for, and the words worth giving it are the ones you will be holding when you come looking, not the ones that describe the thing today. You are not searching your work when you type into that box, but the names you wrote, and nothing else.

The program has no eye and no memory. It cannot see a bathroom window in a photograph. It holds a list of names and matches your word against them. The names it supplies unasked are its notes to itself, so a trail of final and final two records only the order in which you lost confidence in your quoting.

Then the awkwardness of time, which is the whole of the matter. You name a file knowing everything about the job and look for it knowing almost nothing, and those two men are not the same. The one who looks has only a surname half heard on a telephone, a street and a year within one or two. So build the name out of what survives in a human head, which is people and places and plain trade words, and put the date first in figures so the list falls into chronology unasked.

Your century gives two opposite counsels, both half right. One says build a careful tree of folders, the other says never mind filing, the box will find anything. But a tree asks you to remember the reasoning of a man you have ceased to be, and a box can only match words somebody put there. The quarrel is settled by asking which arrangement survives your changing programs. A name travels: into a letter, onto a stick, into whatever you buy next. A tree does not, and labels added inside one program stay there, so a record only one machine can read is on loan rather than in your keeping.

What you are buying is not tidiness but the second job. A householder who rings about old work has already decided to buy. The man who quotes her that afternoon out of a record sells against nobody, while the man who must drive out with a tape has handed her two days to ring elsewhere. He has also turned a returning customer back into a stranger by interviewing her about her own house.

Two cautions. Do not spend a weekend renaming four years of work, for you will stop on the Sunday afternoon with two systems instead of one. The rule begins with the job you finish today. The second is that a rule you cannot say in one breath is a scheme rather than a rule, and schemes are abandoned by March. Four parts is plenty, and put nothing in a name a stranger should not read.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What will I be holding when I come looking? Write down the three things you would truly have in your head. If they are not in the name, the name was written for the machine rather than for you.
2. Can I say my rule in one breath? Say it aloud. If it wants a second breath, cut a part out, since that part is the one you would drop anyway.
3. If I changed program next month, what comes with me? Whatever it is, that is where your filing ought to live.

The Answer to the Riddle

Four years on a householder rang wanting the glass her neighbour had, and neither remembered the job. One of them had it before she was off the telephone. How?

Because he had not filed the job at all. He had named it, with the date, the surname, the street and the thing itself, so the two words the customer could supply were the two standing in the name. The other had filed faultlessly by the month, which was the one fact nobody possessed.

The verse:

The machine has no remembrance, it has only what you wrote,
And it cannot see the window that you glazed in someone's wall.
So give it back the surname and the street and what it was,
For a name is all your filing when the folders cease to call.

Until next time. Go and write your naming rule on one line, put it where you work, and rename the files of the last job you finished.

P.S. The same law rules the largest record in your trade, the box your letters arrive in. A message sent under the heading quote is lost the hour it leaves you. One sent under the surname, the street and the thing is findable as long as you trade.

Also in the archive: The Fortnight in Pencil, The Book He Stopped Writing In and The Ones Who Went Quiet.