Nothing Would Open

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town a round was carried in a coat pocket, and a man who lost his book lost a week. This one borrows your century, where the book is kept for you on a machine in a town you could not name, by a firm you have never met.

Two hairdressers in one town, the same scissors and the same tints.
Both kept the week on a telephone, the hours, the names, the streets, the mixes.
One trusted the program entirely, having never once been let down by it.
One wrote the coming week on a card each Sunday and left it in the van.
Same program, same nine calls on the Tuesday, same notice on the firm's own page at eight in the morning.
Which of the two did her day's work?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two hairdressers in the town I have never named, though this one has a bypass round it. Neither keeps a shop. They go to the house, nine or ten calls a day, a bag of tints in the footwell and the kettle always somebody else's. Both bought the same program in the same spring, and both were right to. It held the week in order, the hour, the name, the street, the number to ring, and against each one a line of particulars: the shade used last time, the stairs the lady cannot manage so the chair goes in the kitchen, the dog shut in the back before you knock.

On a Tuesday in October the first hairdresser could not open it. She tried it twice in the van, thought the fault was hers, and gave it twenty minutes and a flat battery of temper before she found the notice on the firm's own page saying they were aware of the difficulty. It was mended by two in the afternoon, which was handsome of them and no use to her at all.

She knew her nine o'clock, being the same every fortnight, and drove there. After that she was a woman with a telephone and nothing to dial, the numbers being in the program and the streets with them. She found the eleven o'clock from memory of the gate rather than the number, and stood at a door that was not answered, the lady having gone to her daughter's. Two customers rang her, cross, and those she kept. One she reached at four and could not colour, not being willing to guess at a shade she had written down and could not now read. She did three calls of nine, and the two who sat in all morning waiting did not say much about it, which is worse than saying a great deal.

The second hairdresser had the same program and liked it no less. But every Sunday evening, while the tea drew, she wrote the coming week on one card: the days down the side, and for each call the hour, the name, the street, the number, and against three or four of them a shade or a word of warning. It took her six minutes. The card went into the glovebox and the old one went in the bin, and in two years she had not once taken it out.

On that Tuesday she took it out. She worked the round whole, nine calls, and was home at the usual time. Two things had changed since the Sunday, an appointment moved to the Wednesday and a new one put in on the Monday evening, and the card knew nothing of either. She drove to a house where she was not wanted and missed one call altogether. Her bad day cost her one call. The other woman's bad day cost her six, and two of those six never came back.

Be fair to the first. She was not careless and she was not foolish. She had done exactly what the program asked of her, which was to put everything in it, and that instruction was sound. It had not failed in three years, and a thing that has not failed in three years quietly stops being a thing that can.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Whatever holds the next two days of your work holds your trade, and it should not be the only place that work exists. Not a second system. One card, written in minutes, thrown away and written again.

Begin with why the thing fails, because traders argue about this and pick the wrong end of it. You cannot know which fault will come. The firm's own machines, as it was here. A bank card that expired in September, so the account closes itself on the first of the month without malice. A telephone in a gutter. A password changed by somebody who has left. A farm at the end of a lane with no signal in it. An improvement that moves everything on the Monday. They have nothing in common except the consequence, which is always the same: you cannot read your own week. So do not insure against the cause. Insure against the consequence, once, and the list of causes stops mattering.

And note which way the blame runs, for that is the part that stings. Not one of those faults is yours. Every one of them is your problem. The lady sitting in with her coat over the chair does not know that a firm two hundred miles off has a notice on its page. She knows you did not come.

Then the price of the remedy, which is the whole argument. Six minutes on a Sunday, known and dull, against a day of your fullest week, unknown, and arriving on the morning you can least spare it, since the busy weeks are the weeks where the loss is largest. That is insurance at a quarter of an hour a month, and you would take those terms anywhere else in your trade without a second thought.

Now the part most men get wrong, which is what to copy. This is not the argument about records that have never once been taken out of a machine, which concerns possession and is a different matter again. Four thousand old jobs, every invoice since the year you started, the whole archive: that can wait a week, and waiting a week costs you nothing. What cannot wait is small. Who, where, when, what number, and the two or three particulars you would otherwise have to work out from scratch. Ask of each thing in your program not how much it would hurt to lose, but whether you would need it before Thursday. Almost nothing passes that test, and what passes it fits on one side of a card.

Two cautions. The first is that a card is not a second set of books, and the moment it becomes one you have bought the whole trouble of keeping the same fact in two places. Nothing is ever written into the card first. Nothing is ever read off the card into the program. It is a photograph of Sunday, no more, and it is wrong by Wednesday in small ways, and that is acceptable, because a week that is nine tenths right in your hand beats a week that is perfect and shut. The second caution is that none of this is an argument for distrusting the tools. The program had saved the first hairdresser an hour a week for three years and she was right to have bought it. Her error was never the buying. It was having one road in and no other.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. If nothing would open tomorrow morning, where is my first call and what is the number? Say both aloud now, before you reach for the screen. Whatever you cannot say is the size of the hole, and you have found it on a quiet evening rather than at ten past eight on a wet Tuesday.
2. What would I need in the next forty-eight hours, as against ever? Write that and nothing else. If it runs past one side of paper you have begun copying the archive, so strike out until it fits.
3. Have I ever worked a single day off the copy? Run one ordinary day next week from the card without opening the program at all, and write down at the gate what was missing. A precaution that has never been used is not a precaution. It is a hope with a date on it.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of the two did her day's work?

The second, with one call lost out of nine, and that one lost because her card was written on the Sunday and the world moved on the Monday. The first did three, and spent the rest of the day being a stranger at her own customers' doors.

She was not beaten by the machine, which was a good machine and mended by two. She was beaten by having put the whole of her week down one road, and by never once having asked what she would do on the morning that road was shut. Six minutes and a card stood between those two women, and it was not six minutes of cleverness.

The verse:

The one trusted the humming screen
that nothing could unseat;
the other wrote it on a card,
and hers was still complete.

Until next time. Go and write tomorrow's work on one side of a card, the hour, the name, the street and the number to ring, and put it where your hand would find it with every screen you own gone dark.

P.S. One small thing, worth the two minutes today. Most firms that sell you a program keep a page of their own that says whether it is working, and on the bad morning that page is the difference between knowing in one minute and doubting your own telephone for twenty. Find it now, while nothing is wrong, and write its address on the same card. A fault you can name at ten past eight is a fault you can tell a customer about before she has put her coat on.

Also in the archive: The Morning She Waited In, The Wardrobe on the Stairs and The One Name He Never Cut.