Nobody Blames a Mill

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town two men were let down by the same mill in the same week, and only one was thought careless for it.

Two paperhangers in one town, the same paste and the same trestles.
Both waited on one mill for one pattern of green flock paper.
Both were nine days late into the same drawing room.
One of them wrote a letter on a Tuesday that nobody had asked for.
Same mill, same nine days, same work at the end of it.
Which of the two was thought careless?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two paperhangers in the town I have never named. Both had the same job that September: a drawing room hung with green flock before the daughter of the house was married, the Friday fortnight agreed by everybody. The paper was made at one mill only, and both men ordered from the same agent in the same week.

On the Tuesday both had the same note back. A beam had gone in the printing house and the flock would be nine days behind, and each man read it in his own doorway that morning.

The first paperhanger wrote to the householder that evening. The paper would be nine days late, the fault was at the mill, and the new day was the Wednesday week. Then he set out the nine days. He could come on the Thursday as arranged, strip the old paper and size the walls, so that when the flock came there was nothing to do but hang it. Or he had two patterns in his own stock at the same money, to be seen in the light of that room. She chose the stripping, and the room was finished on the Wednesday he had named.

The second paperhanger put the note in his pocket. He was neither idle nor dishonest, and he had his reason: he had known that mill to be a week wrong the other way, early rather than late, and he did not care to alarm a customer over a thing that might not happen. So he said nothing, meaning to speak if it came to it. It came to it. He arrived on the Friday fortnight with his brushes and no paper, into a room where the carpet was up and the furniture stood under sheets, and he explained. The mill, the printing house, the beam, nothing to do with him. Every word of it true, with the agent's note to prove it.

He hung that paper nine days later and hung it beautifully, the pattern true across the chimney breast. The breakfast had been held in the back parlour. She paid him in full, never sent for him again, and when her sister asked who had done the drawing room she said the paper was pretty and there had been trouble with the man.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

The same true account of a delay is heard as competence nine days before the date and as an excuse the day after it. This is unjust, in a sense, and perfectly predictable, which makes it a thing to work with rather than complain of.

Begin with how a customer holds a job in her head. She does not hold a chain of parties, each with its own broken beam. She holds one name, and it is yours. That is not stupidity; it is the whole reason she engaged you. What she bought, above the paperhanging, was the right to stop thinking about the mill and the carrier. So when the chain fails she has nowhere to put it but on the one part of the arrangement she chose. Nobody blames a mill. A mill is an abstraction two counties off. You are a man at a door with a brush.

Now for the part that is less obvious. The day you choose does not change how your account feels so much as what kind of thing it is. Given before the date it is a forecast, and only a man watching his own work can make one. Given after the date the identical sentence is a defence, offered when it can no longer be checked by a man with every interest in being believed. We discount testimony given under those conditions, rightly, for it is the characteristic speech of the careless. She has heard about the broken beam before, from men who were watching nothing at all, and after the fact she cannot tell you from them. Before the fact she can, because the careless man never writes on the Tuesday. The letter is not a courtesy. It is the only proof available that you are keeping the date rather than hoping at it.

You will be told that carrying bad news early is borrowing trouble, and that reasoning deserves an answer rather than a sneer. Price the two mistakes. Warn her and let the mill come good after all: you have cost her a few minutes of mild concern, and you are a man whose dates are watched. Keep quiet and let the mill be late: you have cost her a morning, a wedding breakfast and her good opinion, the dearest of the three. The errors are not of one size, so the choice is not close. And the early letter does more than soften a blow. Nine days out there are three ways through the trouble; on the Friday morning there is one, and it is an apology.

Now, what travels with the news. Never send it alone. Send a new date, an actual day of the week, since nobody can make an arrangement out of an assurance that you will be as quick as you can. Send what you will do in the meantime. Send a choice where one honestly exists, and let it be hers. And spend few words on whose fault it was, because a customer will buy the remedy and never the blame.

Two cautions. A warning is not a hedge, and must not become the habit of naming dates you do not believe in order to be safe from them; a man who warns on every job has a scheduling difficulty rather than a speaking one, and his letters come to count for no more than the weather. And do not explain more than one link of the chain. She does not want the printing house. She wants the Wednesday.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. Which of your jobs sits on somebody else's date? Write them down, and beside each the party who could make you late.
2. When did you last hear a piece of bad news, and when did the customer? The gap between those two days is the whole of this letter. If it ran longer than an evening, the fault was not the mill's.
3. What can be done while the thing is waited for? Find the part that does not depend on what has not come. Done early, it turns nine idle days into nine of visible progress.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of the two was thought careless?

The second, and he was no more careless than the first. He had the same note on the same morning and excellent work in his hands. He held his news until the day on which it could only be an excuse, and by then the truth of it had stopped mattering. Only one was late in a way that cost him the next job.

The verse:

The mill was late for both of them,
the paper came the same,
but one had sent a Tuesday note
and one was left the blame.

Until next time. Go and send, today, the bad news on your slowest job, with a new date written in it.

P.S. Send it in writing even when you have said it to their face. A spoken warning is remembered as a mood and a written one as a date, and when your customer repeats the matter to somebody else, as she will, she can repeat only what she is able to look at.

Also in the archive: Unless I Hear Otherwise, The Morning the Fire Was Out and The Card Already Written.