Sheets in Four Hallways

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two house painters were asked in the same week of April for the same work, a staircase and two bedrooms, and both named four pounds for it.

Two painters, the same town, the same white lead and the same boiled oil,
The same four pounds for a staircase and two bedrooms, the same nine days of work in each.
One had his sheets down in four hallways at once, and was on a ladder from six until dark.
One had his sheets down in a single hallway, and carried them out on the ninth day.
By midsummer both had painted four houses, and neither had idled an hour.
Why was only one of them paid in May, and asked for by the neighbours in June?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two house painters in the town I've never named. Staircases, parlours, bedrooms, the odd shopfront, and the whole patient business of rubbing down, stopping the holes, undercoat, and two coats with a day between. Both charged four pounds for a staircase and two bedrooms, and both were sound workmen. The first, if anything, had the better hand with a sash window.

In the last week of April four households sent for each of them. The first painter, who could not bear to be the man who says no, opened all four. Sheets down in a hallway on the Monday, sheets down in another on the Tuesday, a morning here and an afternoon there, rubbing down in one house while an undercoat dried in the next. He rose at half past five and worked till the light went.

From inside the four houses it looked like this. A family ate in the kitchen for five weeks with the parlour furniture heaped under a sheet. A staircase stood bare and half rubbed down, climbed each night with a candle past a bannister nobody could hold. Asked when he might be back, he said Thursday, and meant it, and on Thursday he was generally in another man's hall, because whoever had grown most anxious got him.

The second painter put his sheets down in one hallway on the Monday. He was in that house nine days, carried them out on the ninth, was paid on the tenth, and began the next house on the eleventh. Then the next, and the next after that.

By midsummer both had painted four houses, and their hours were the same to within a morning. But the second had been paid in the second week of May, again at the end of it, and twice more before the longest day, while the first was owed sixteen pounds and had had none of it. Twice a neighbour watched the sheets come out of a finished house and asked him in before the cart was loaded.

Be fair to the first man. He did not open four houses out of vanity. Each household had waited a fortnight for him already, and starting felt courteous, a promise made with a dust sheet instead of a sentence. He believed too, not foolishly, that a job begun was a job nobody could take from him. What he never counted was the five weeks, because they did not happen to him. They happened in four kitchens he was not in.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Nothing you have started has bought you anything. Work turns into money, and into a reputation, and into the next job, at the moment it is finished and not one day before. You keep your accounts in effort, which is continuous and which you can feel. Your customer keeps his in finishes, which are sudden. Between those two ledgers sits every man who worked himself thin all spring and could not say in June what he had to show for it.

The arithmetic is worth doing slowly, because it is the whole argument. Four jobs, nine days of work in each. Run them together and all four finish around the thirty-sixth day. Run them strictly in turn and they finish on the ninth, the eighteenth, the twenty-seventh and the thirty-sixth. The labour is identical, the last day is identical, and nobody works faster or longer. Yet three of the four customers have their houses back weeks earlier, and the average wait is cut by nearly half. Being slow is seldom a fault of the hands. It is a decision about order, taken without anybody noticing that a decision was made. You are paid at finishes too, so the man with four houses open has lent four customers a month of labour and materials and charged nothing for the loan.

Then the part nobody writes down. Every open job carries a running cost: sheets in and out, a quarter of an hour each morning remembering where you left off, and one more person entitled to stop you in the street with a fair question. Four do not cost four times one, because the interruptions multiply against each other. Nor has an unfinished house ever been recommended to anybody. While work is open the talk about you is anxious talk, and only at the finish does it become talk about the staircase, as I set out in the letter on the part of the work your customer actually watches.

Two cautions. First, no trade can keep this rule to the letter. Plaster must dry, a part must come from the maker, another trade must be out of the room before you can be in it. The rule is not that you may never have two jobs open, but that you may not have more open than you could finish inside a fortnight, and that a job left waiting should be waiting on something real rather than on your attention. Second, do not make it an excuse for silence. A householder told you will start on the twelfth and be gone by the twenty-first waits comfortably. One told nothing waits badly and sends for another man. Give the date as a plain fact, as I argued in saying your lead time without apology.

Three questions, and the second will take ten minutes with a pencil and change your year:

1. How many jobs do you have open at this moment, and how many could be finished this week if you touched nothing else? Count only what a customer would call under way. The first number is generally larger than a man expects, and the second smaller.
2. If you finished them strictly in turn, what date would the first customer be done, and when would you be paid? Set those dates beside the ones you are presently heading for. Few men write that column out and carry on as before.
3. When you last took work you could not begin properly, what did you give the customer, a date or a start? The start comforts you and the date comforts him, and only one of them costs you nothing to keep.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why was only one of them paid in May, and asked for by the neighbours in June?

Because starting is not selling, and busy is not finished. The first painter turned his spring into work begun, which cannot be spent, praised or recommended. The second held one house at a time and every ninth day handed a household back its hall, took his money, and left behind the only advertisement a painter has, which is a finished staircase with the smell gone off it. The hours were the same. The order of them was not.

The verse:

One painter kept four hallways bare and hurried between them,
One painter kept the single house and closed it on the ninth.
The hours were the same, the hands were the same, the price was the same money,
But one of them was finishing, and one was only starting.

Until next time. Go and list every job you have open, and write beside each the date it would be finished if you took them strictly in turn.

P.S. One more cost, and it is the one that stings. The best work of the year arrives without warning, and goes to whoever can begin it soon. A man with four houses open has nothing to offer it but a fifth dust sheet and a vague spring. A man who finishes in turn can say the eleventh, and mean it, and be believed. Room in the diary is not idleness. It is what you sell to the customer you most want.

Also in the archive: Booked Until March, The Same Tuesday and The Last Twenty Minutes.