One Joint in Twenty

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two plumbers wiped the same lead joints for the same money, and nothing told them apart until the first hard frost.

Two plumbers in one town, the same lead and the same ladle.
Both wiped a joint as well as a joint can be wiped.
Both had one gutter in twenty weep at the first hard frost.
Both went out in February to put it right at their own cost.
One of them arrived in a temper and one of them did not.
Which, and what had he done the previous June?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two plumbers, in the town I have never named. Both kept the sheet rolled on end against the shop wall, and both could wipe a joint with a moleskin cloth and a ladle of hot solder in the way that looks like nothing until you have tried it. In the same autumn each relined a parapet gutter behind a shop in the square, three pounds twelve the pair of them asked, and both did honest work.

Both knew what nobody tells a customer. Lead moves. It creeps under the heat of a July roof and draws back in the cold. A joint wiped sound in October will now and then open a hair's breadth in a January frost and weep down a bedroom wall. About one in twenty, and never the one you would have picked.

The first plumber had settled his price with a pencil on the back of a merchant's invoice. Lead, solder, tallow, a day and a half of himself, a little for the tools. Honest arithmetic, which assumed without saying so that every job ended when he came down the ladder. So when word came in February he was being asked for something he had never been paid for, and he behaved as any man does in that position. He came the week after, wiped the hair of a gap in twenty minutes, and then stood in the hall rather longer explaining that the frost was not of his making. Every word true. He charged nothing, which was right, and went home with the unfairness of the day in his knees.

The second plumber kept a thin book, because a man who had taught him said to. In it were the jobs, and at the back, in a column of their own, the mends. Two hundred and forty jobs, twelve mends, and a cost against each: a day, a journey, a few shillings of lead, and the work he could not take while up a ladder for nothing. Four pounds, the twelve of them, which divided out at rather less than four shillings a job. So he put four shillings on and told nobody, and nobody remarked upon it, because no man looks at a figure of three pounds sixteen and feels an injury about the last four shillings.

Then came his own February, his own weeping joint, and a housekeeper at the door at eight in the morning. He went that same day. He did not mention the frost. He said that a joint in twenty does this and that he had allowed for it, which was the plain truth and sounded like generosity. He wiped it and gave a quarter of an hour to the rest of the run. It cost a day he had been paid for in June. The housekeeper told the draper, and the draper told the ironmonger.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

You can never know which job will come back, but you can know how many will, and a price that does not carry them is not a price but a hope. One of them had counted and the other had not.

Consider why this is possible at all. A single failure cannot be forecast. You cannot say which gutter, which boiler, which delivery. The rate of failure across a hundred jobs is as steady as the weather in a county, and steady things can be priced. Every insurance office that ever took a premium lives in that gap between the instance and the rate, and a one-man trade may do the same for itself. It is the discipline that makes a price carry the days nobody pays you for, turned upon the days you hope will never come.

Take the money at the moment of failure instead and it is ruinous twice. Once in the pocket, since the mend falls on a single job priced for less profit than that, and once in the temper, which is the half that costs you more. A man who has not been paid to come back cannot help conducting an argument while he does it. He delays, because the unpaid work waits and the paid work shouts. He explains the frost. He wants it admitted that this is not his fault. He may be entirely in the right and will still lose the household, since what is remembered is not the fault but the fortnight and the lecture.

The man who has already been paid behaves like a different trade altogether. He arrives on the Tuesday, puts it right, says little, and leaves behind a householder who will tell four people that when the thing went wrong he simply came and mended it. There is no advertisement to be had for four shillings that does that. You have made the cheerful remedy affordable in advance, and taken the frost onto your own account rather than your customer's, which is carrying the buyer's risk turned to face your own ledger.

Two cautions. The allowance buys a defined promise and not an open one, so say what it covers and for how long before anybody needs it. Putting right your own work for a stated period is a four shilling promise. Standing behind another trade's damage, or a change of mind, or twenty years of neglect, is not. The second caution is nearer home. An allowance for the rate you cannot help is sound business. One that absorbs careless work is a subsidy paid to your own decline, and the guard against it is that column at the back of the book. If the rate climbs, the answer is in the workshop and not in the price.

Three questions, the first answerable from your own records tonight:

1. Of your last fifty jobs, how many came back? Count them in the book, not in your head, which keeps the two that were painful and loses the rest.
2. What does one of them cost you? The materials are the smallest part. Add the journey, the day, the work you pushed back, and the hour on the telephone.
3. What is that total divided by your year's jobs? That is the figure which belongs inside every price you give from now on, rounded up to a convenient coin and buried in the total rather than set beside it, where it only invites the customer to take the estimate apart.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of the two arrived without a temper, and what had he done the previous June?

The second, and what he had done in June was add four shillings to a price nobody queried. His good humour in February was no virtue of character. It was bought in the summer at a trifling cost, and the only reason the first plumber did not buy it too is that he had never counted his mends, and took them for bad luck rather than a line in his accounts.

The verse:

The frost will find one joint in twenty
However sound the lead;
So charge for it in summertime
And go out glad instead.

Until next time. Go and count, from the book and not from memory, how many of your last fifty jobs came back.

P.S. Keep the mends in their own column for three years and watch the figure. A rate that falls is the only honest proof that you have learned your trade better, and it is also your permission to keep the four shillings, which were priced against the old rate and have gone unremarked ever since.

Also in the archive: Five for the Money of Three, Never Once Refused and The One-Star Reply.