Notice at Michaelmas

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, at the wash-house behind the lane, where a woman has been doing the same household's linen for fifteen years and dreads every Monday.

Two laundresses, one heavy account,
Same fifteen years, same growing load.
One bears it on, and says no word,
One gives them notice, kindly worded.
Both lose the work. One gains the year.
What did the ending buy? And where?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two laundresses in the town I've never named, and their work, in the old chorus, was equally white. Each had one large household that had been with her fifteen years.

The first had watched hers change without ever quite noticing. The rate had been agreed in a different decade. The quantity had crept, a few items at a time, none of them worth a conversation. The house now expected Thursday as well as Monday, sent things back over trifles, and paid late in a manner that suggested she should be grateful for the account at all.

She endured it, for the reason everybody endures such things: fifteen years is a great deal to set fire to, and the money, though poor, was certain.

What it cost her was invisible and considerable. Two Mondays a week were spoken for at a bad rate, so she could take no new household of any size. She was tired and short with people who did not deserve it. And she turned away, over the years, three families who would have paid properly and been pleasant, because she had no room, and the room was occupied by the account she dreaded.

She would have told you she could not afford to lose them. In truth she could not afford to keep them, and had not done the sum.

The second laundress did the sum, and then did the harder thing.

She gave two months' notice, in writing, and the writing had no grievance anywhere in it. Her work had grown beyond what she could give it properly at the old arrangement, and rather than let the standard slip she would finish at Michaelmas. She named two women who could take it on and said she had spoken to both. She offered to do the last eight weeks exactly as before, and did.

Notice what she did not do. She did not list the fifteen years of small irritations, though she could have and every one would have been true. She did not use it to extract a better rate at the last moment, which is what people suspect when they hear such a letter. And she did not vanish, which is how these things usually end, with a series of unavailable weeks until the customer takes the hint.

The household was not pleased and did not argue, and the eldest daughter of that house sent her a customer the following spring, which would not have happened had the parting been shabby.

And within a season the two Mondays held two new households at a proper rate, both of them a pleasure, which is the whole of the arithmetic.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A customer you dread is not merely unprofitable. He is occupying the space in which a better one would sit. The sum that keeps people trapped counts only the money coming in, which is real and certain and frightening to lose. It never counts the hours, the tiredness, the standard slipping elsewhere, or the work you could not take, and once those are set down the endured account is usually revealed to be a customer you have been paying to keep.

This is the innkeeper's rule arriving fifteen years late, which is the harder version, since refusing a stranger at the door costs nothing but a moment and ending with somebody of long standing feels like a betrayal of your own history.

So do it in a way you can be proud of, because the manner is what the town will hear about. Give real notice, long enough that nobody is stranded. State a reason that is true and forward-looking rather than a recitation of grievances, since the grievances change nothing now and will be repeated to everybody. Name a successor and speak to them first. Finish the last stretch at the same standard as the first, which is the part that decides what is said about you afterwards. And leave the door open, plainly, because circumstances change on both sides.

Two warnings. Do not use the ending as a negotiating move, since a threat dressed as a farewell is recognised at once and poisons whatever follows. And do not do it in temper on a bad Tuesday: write the letter in a calm week, put it aside for three days, and send it if it still reads well.

Three questions, and do the first with a pen:

1. What does your worst account actually pay you an hour? Include the chasing, the redoing, the Thursday that was never agreed. Compare it with your best. Most people are startled, and the startlement is what makes the decision possible.
2. What would you do with the space? Name the work you would take instead, and whether it exists. A departure with nothing to fill it is a fright; a departure with two households waiting is a plan.
3. What would your notice say? Write it now, without grievance, with a date and a successor in it. If you cannot write it without complaint, you are not ready to send it and the complaint is what would be remembered.

The Answer to the Riddle

What did the ending buy?

Two Mondays, at a proper rate, and a recommendation from the very house she had left. Both women lost the same account, and one lost it slowly over years while it drained her Mondays and her temper, and the other lost it in eight weeks on her own terms and with her name intact. Fifteen years is a long time to have served somebody, and it is not a reason to serve them for a sixteenth, which is the sum nobody does because it looks like ingratitude and is merely arithmetic.

The verse:

The account you dread on Monday morn
Is holding open someone's chair.
Give notice kind, and name a name,
And find who's been waiting there.

Until next time. Go and work out what your worst account pays you an hour, and if the answer is what I expect, write the notice this week and send it next.

P.S. Occasionally the letter produces the opposite result: the household, faced with losing you, offers the proper rate and mends its manners. Take it if the offer is real and the manners hold for three months, and understand what has happened. You did not negotiate. You were willing to leave, which is the only position from which anything is ever renegotiated.

Also in the archive: The Innkeeper's Rule, The Cooper and the Single Gate and The Crowded End.