Six Springs in a Drawer

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two locksmiths were called to the same sort of jammed lock in the same sort of back door, and charged the same for mending it.

Two locksmiths, the same town, the same springs from the same maker at fourpence apiece,
The same one and ninepence for a lock put right, the same civil manner at the door.
One looked, wrote the pattern in his book, and said he would send away for the part.
One looked, pulled out a shallow drawer on his handcart, and was gone before the kettle boiled.
By Christmas the second had the locks of half that street and a joiner's account besides.
The spring cost fourpence to both of them. What did the first man spend that the second did not?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two locksmiths in the town I've never named. Rim locks, mortice locks, keys cut from the blank, bolts, window fastenings, and the whole small iron business of keeping other people's doors shut. Both charged one and ninepence to put a lock right, fourpence of it the spring. On the bench the first was the better craftsman, which is worth saying plainly because it stayed true to the end.

In the second week of November the back door of a house in the lane stopped locking. The first locksmith came the same afternoon, which was creditable. He took the lock off, laid it open on a cloth on the kitchen table, and showed the woman of the house the broken spring. Then he wrote the pattern in his book, said he had not that spring by him, and that he would send for it. He was asked how long. He could not rightly say, but they were generally quick.

It was nine days. For nine days that door was shut with a bolt worked only from the inside, so the coal came round the front through the passage, and everybody went out and came in by the front door, and each time they did it they thought, for half a second, about the lock. On the tenth day he mended it in eleven minutes, faultlessly, and would not take a penny for the second journey because he did not feel he had earned one.

The second locksmith kept a drawer on his handcart, a shallow thing not eighteen inches across, holding the six commonest springs, a card of staples, two escutcheons, a paper of screws and a tin of tallow. He had arrived at the six by noticing, over one winter, what he kept having to go back for. Called to a jammed lock in the next street that same month, he was there forty minutes and left with one and ninepence and the lock working.

Be fair to the first man. He carried nothing because he had reasoned that stock is money standing still, and a drawer of springs might sit a year and earn nothing. He was right about that, and about the fourpence, and about not charging for his own mistake. What he never counted was the nine days, because they did not happen to him.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Your customer is not buying the work. He is buying the end of the trouble, and every day between your arrival and that end is a day he is still in it. You measure a job in labour. He measures it in calendar. The first locksmith spent seventy minutes of his own life on that lock, which by his reckoning made him quick. The household spent nine days going round to the front door, which by theirs made him slow, and no sentence could have reconciled the two figures.

This matters far past the inconvenience, because of what a second visit actually is. It is not the tail end of the first one. It is a whole new beginning, and beginnings are where things come apart. A date must be found in a diary that has since filled up, the customer is out when you call, and above all he has time to think. Nine days is long enough to get another price and to notice that the man he engaged cannot, after all, finish what he starts. You will never hear any of that. You will hear that the job was done and nobody complained.

There is money in it too, and it is your money. The second journey is almost never charged, because it feels indecent to charge for it, so you pay the road and the hour yourself. I have written before about the attendance you give away with every small job, and a return visit is that same loss taken twice for one fee. Meanwhile the delay sits between your customer's wanting and his having, the exact ground where willing people quietly stop, as I argued in the letter on the size of the step you put in their way.

The cure is not heroic. In nearly every trade a small handful of causes account for most of the second visits, the same handful every year, and almost nobody has written them down. Six springs in a drawer. The connector you always lack. The form nobody thought to bring. The answer you must go back to the office to look up. None of it is expensive. It is invisible, which is different.

Two cautions. First, this is not an instruction to carry everything, which is how a man turns his working capital into a cartload of iron he will never use. The method is counting first: find the six things that actually sent you back, carry those, and let the rest be sent for. Second, do not buy the finish today at the cost of finishing properly. A lock forced to work by Tuesday and failing in March costs you more than nine days ever could. When a part must genuinely come from the maker, say so with a date attached. Not generally quick. The fourteenth.

Three questions, and the last one is the one most trades have never answered:

1. Of your last thirty jobs, how many needed a second visit, and what caused each one? Write the causes in a column. You are looking for the same word appearing four times, and you will find it.
2. What would it cost to carry the six commonest of those causes always? Set the figure against one morning of your own time and the fare, and the drawer generally pays for itself before February.
3. When a thing genuinely must be sent for, does your customer get a date or a reassurance? A date can be planned around and a reassurance cannot, and that difference is the whole of the waiting.

The Answer to the Riddle

The spring cost fourpence to both of them. What did the first man spend that the second did not?

Nine days of somebody else's life, which he did not think of as his to spend because the bill for them never reached him. He spent a second journey too, and could not charge for it, so the fourpence he saved by carrying nothing came back at about a shilling an hour, in the wrong direction. The second locksmith had understood something simple. The lock was never the thing he was selling. The unbolted door was the thing he was selling, and he alone could hand it over the same afternoon.

The verse:

One locksmith wrote the pattern down and sent off to the maker,
One locksmith pulled a drawer out and was finished before noon.
The spring was fourpence either way, and both of them were honest,
But one of them sold nine days, and the other sold a lock.

Until next time. Go and count how many of your last thirty jobs needed a second visit, and write beside each the thing you did not have with you.

P.S. The drawer earns most of its keep on the work you never hear about. A customer with a small fault asks once, and if the answer is that you must come back another day for a fourpenny part, a fair number decide it is not worth the fuss and live with it. They do not tell you so. They simply do not send word again, and you go on believing there was no work there, when there was, and you priced it in days.

Also in the archive: Twopence and Half a Mile, The Last Twenty Minutes and The Clear Evening.