Sent in His Name

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Not the old town this time but a town of your own century, where two driving instructors gave up the paper diary in the same spring, and one of them spent an evening as his own pupil.

Two driving instructors in one town, the same dual-controlled car and the same thirty-four pounds an hour.
Both gave up the diary that spring for the same arrangement on a screen.
Both had their pupils reminded, invoiced and thanked without lifting a finger.
One made the machine send him the nine messages it sends a pupil, and changed six.
One left every word as it came out of the box, and lost pupils who never complained.
Neither man wrote a line to a customer all year. Why did only one sound like himself?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two driving instructors, in a town I have never named and a century I have never seen. Both with a small car kept cleaner than their own kitchens, a second set of pedals under the passenger mat, and the roundabout by the retail park where everybody loses their nerve. Neither was the better teacher.

That spring both gave up the paper diary.

In its place both took the same arrangement, the sort of thing a man pays a few pounds a month for, which holds the week, lets a pupil pick an hour without telephoning, takes the money off a card, and sends word the evening before. A sound tool, and both got their Sunday evenings back.

The difference was one evening in the first week. Before he let the thing speak to anybody, the first instructor signed himself up as a pupil under his own name and number. He booked an hour, moved it, cancelled one, and let a payment go late. Nine messages arrived over two days, and he read them as a stranger would.

What he found was not a fault. It was all perfectly correct, and none of it was his. The reminder came at twenty past six in the morning, a reasonable hour to a machine and an unreasonable one to a woman who works nights. It called him a client, a word he had not used about anybody in sixteen years. The note after the cancelled hour said his booking had been removed, and nothing of putting another in its place. The one about money was headed as a final notice on the ninth day. At the foot of every message stood the name of the firm that made the arrangement, in grey, above a line explaining how to stop receiving these communications.

He spent two hours on it. The reminder moved to five in the afternoon and came down to eighteen words, client became the pupil's first name, and the cancellation note now offered the two nearest free hours and asked which suited. Then he thought no more about it for a year.

Be fair to the second instructor, who was not the lazy one. He read the whole manual, which the first man never did. He simply never received his own messages, and nobody was going to send them to him. The pupil woken at twenty past six turned her notifications off and then missed an hour. The one told her booking had been removed took that as the end of the matter and found somebody else by Thursday. Neither of them said a word to him about it.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Every word your machinery sends out over your name was written by a stranger who has never seen your trade, and your customer reads it as your own voice. You are the only person in the whole arrangement who never receives it.

That last part is the mechanism. A tool of this kind faces two ways. One face is turned to you: the week on the screen, the money arriving, the evening given back. The other faces your customers, is made of words, and no copy of it ever reaches you. So a man forms a confident opinion of his tool on the evidence of half of it.

Those words were written once, for everybody, by somebody whose task was a message correct in every trade in the country. There is no such message. Correct for everybody means particular to nobody, and out comes the flat municipal English of the form and the notice. Your customer does not know it came in a box. She knows only that the man who was kind about the roundabout on Tuesday calls her a client on Wednesday. I have argued that the first job of any message is to look like it came from a person. A settings page is where that now gets decided, by somebody or by nobody. A letter written badly is read badly once. A default left alone goes out three hundred times a year to every customer you have, which makes it the most widely published writing you will ever put your name to, and in most small firms the only writing nobody has read.

The case against is not stupid. These defaults were tested on thousands of firms, and are often better than what you would scrawl at eleven at night. But notice what they were tested for: that the message arrives, the bill is paid and the maker is not complained about. Respectable aims, and none of them is that your customer should feel she is dealing with you.

The happier side is that your rivals have not looked either, so a reminder in plain words at a sensible hour sets you apart for the price of one evening. What gets delivered in your name while you are out of the room was once the business of whoever minded the counter. It is now the business of a machine working from somebody else's script, and it works chiefly on those who have already paid you, who decide whether there is a second year.

Two cautions. First, a reminder is not an opportunity to be charming. Its work is the date, the hour, the place and what to bring, said as briefly as a decent person would say it. Plain is the aim, not clever. Second, do not switch things off in the name of voice. The man who dislikes the wording and turns the reminder off has traded a slightly wrong message for an empty hour, which is far worse.

Three questions, and the first wants doing before the week is out:

1. What does your machinery say, and at what hour? Sign yourself up as your own customer. Book, move, cancel, pay late, and read what arrives in one sitting.
2. Which words in it are not yours? Hunt the ones you have never said aloud: client, ticket, your request has been received, do not reply to this address. Then make sure the name at the bottom is yours.
3. Which of these go to somebody who has already paid you? Those decide whether there is a next time, and are nearly always the ones left exactly as they came. Mend them first.

The Answer to the Riddle

Neither man wrote a line to a customer all year. Why did only one of them sound like himself?

Because one of them read his own post. He made the machine treat him as a pupil for an evening, and so learned what nine hundred people were to be told in his name before any of them was told it. The other sent three hundred letters a year written by a stranger, signed by him, and read by nobody on his side of the arrangement. His pupils never complained, because nobody complains about a message. They go quiet, and a quiet customer teaches you nothing.

The verse:

The machine is a clerk you have never once met,
And it writes in your name every day of the year.
It will say what a stranger has told it to say
Till the evening you sit down and read as they hear.

Until next time. Go and sign yourself up as your own customer today, under your own name, and keep every message the machine sends back.

P.S. Look hardest at the address these messages go out from. A great many cannot be replied to, so the customer who answers your reminder to say she must move an hour is writing into a drawer nobody opens. She has been courteous, has had no answer, and the next she hears is a charge for the hour she tried to cancel. That is not a matter of wording. It is a door you did not know you had bricked up.

Also in the archive: Two Piles at Breakfast, The Boy Minding the Shop and The Message Nobody Missed.