Still Setting It Up at Christmas

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. I am told that in your century a man may rent, for the price of a week of coal, a machine that will do a hundred jobs, and that this is not always the bargain it appears.

Two dog groomers in your own century, the same two rooms and the same six hours of appointments a day.
Both tired of a paper book coming apart at the spine, and both willing to pay by the month to be rid of it.
One bought the program that does the one job, and had it keeping the diary by the Thursday.
The other bought the program that does everything, and was still setting it up at Christmas.
By the end of the year the two had paid out very nearly the same money.
One of them had paid a great deal more. Which, and why?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two dog groomers, in a town much like the one I have never named, though set in your century rather than mine. Each had a front room with a bath and a table in it, a back room for the drying, and a book of appointments gone soft at the corners. Each took about sixty dogs a month, mostly the same dogs, mostly every eight weeks. In the same March both decided the book had to go on a screen, and both were right.

The first groomer did something before she looked at a single program. She wrote on the back of an envelope what the thing had to do. A list of appointments she could see on her telephone between dogs. A message to the customer the night before, so the empty chair stops happening. A way of seeing who has not been in since the spring. Three jobs, and she could say all three in a breath. She found a program that did those and very little else, at eleven pounds the month, and on the Thursday evening she sat down with the old book and typed in the standing customers. It took two hours and ten minutes. On the Friday it sent its first reminders, in the words she had given it. The paper book went into the drawer that week and was never opened again.

The second groomer did what any sensible man would do. He thought that if he was to pay for a program he might as well pay for a good one, and he bought the one sold as running the whole business. Diary, invoices, stock of shampoo and blades, letters to customers, a page for people to book themselves in, reports on every figure a trade can produce. Thirty days to try it, then a sum that came, by the year, within twenty pounds of what the first groomer paid.

He gave it the first evening and got as far as the opening questions, which asked what his services were, how long each took, which could be booked without his say-so, and what a deposit ought to be. Reasonable questions, and he found he did not know the answers in the form the machine wanted them. He gave it the next Sunday, and the Sunday after. In May he brought his customers across, and the machine made two of every third one, the names having come in twice from two places. In June he turned the booking page half on and then off again, not being sure what it would promise people. The reminders he never turned on at all, having never settled what they should say.

All that time, and this is the part that matters, he kept the paper book going. He had to. A trade cannot stop while a man finishes setting up, and the machine was never finished enough to be trusted with a Tuesday. So the appointments lived in two places. In October a woman came at two o'clock with a spaniel, written in the paper book and not in the machine, where a collie stood at the same hour. One of those dogs went home unwashed and that customer has not come back.

Now reckon the year. The two paid out almost the same money. The first gave the business two hours and ten minutes of one Thursday. The second gave it near forty evenings, ran his trade out of two books for nine months, and lost a customer of four years to a collision between them. The program was not a bad program. It was a very good one, built for a firm with eight groomers and somebody on the desk whose job is to mind it. He had bought a thing that needed an owner, and he was the only person in the building, and he was in the back room drying a labrador.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A tool whose job you cannot say in one plain sentence has not been bought, it has been adopted, and it takes its real payment in your evenings. The money is on the invoice. The evenings are not on anything.

Consider what breadth actually is, when a maker of programs offers it. He has no idea what trade you are in. He cannot know what your appointments are called, how long they take, or whether a customer may book himself in without asking. So he leaves all of it open and hands you the deciding, and the deciding is unfinished work. Breadth is not generosity. It is labour moved off the maker's bench and onto your kitchen table at ten at night, and because he has moved a great deal of it, he can quite honestly charge you very little for what remains.

The sentence is worth writing because a sentence can be tested. Keeps my diary, messages the customer the night before, shows me who has not been in since the spring. In a fortnight you will know whether it does those things, and if it does not you can stop, which is the whole use of naming the measure of a trial before you begin it. A program sold as doing everything can never fail such a test, because nothing in particular was promised. It can only be judged on whether you feel you are keeping up, and that is a feeling with no end to it.

The true expense, though, is not the money or even the evenings. It is the state of being half set up, because your trade cannot pause while you finish. For nine months that second groomer had his appointments on paper and on a screen, and the same information kept in two places is worth less than either copy alone, since you cannot act on one without checking the other. He did not lose that spaniel through carelessness. He lost it because he had stood with a foot on each of two boats since March, and sooner or later the boats move.

There is a fair argument on the other side. A single program holding the diary, the invoices and the stock really is better than four that hold one each and never speak to one another, and that is why such things are built. The argument fails only because the advantage arrives on the day the thing is finished, and finishing is work somebody must do. So the question is not which program is better. It is which can be finished, by the person who will actually finish it, in the hours that person has. A plain tool running on Thursday beats a superior tool arriving in March, because a tool pays you nothing until the day it runs.

Two cautions. The first is that one sentence does not mean cheapest, newest or smallest. Some jobs are genuinely large, and wages, bookings across three sites and stock that must balance are among them. If your job is large, buy the large thing, but put the setting up into the decision as a cost with hours against it, and consider paying somebody for two days rather than paying yourself nothing for forty evenings. The second caution is the opposite ditch. A separate little tool for every little job ends as nine small monthly sums and the same two books problem in a different coat. The rule is the sentence, not the size.

The Answer to the Riddle

By the end of the year the two had paid out very nearly the same money. One of them had paid a great deal more. Which, and why?

The second, by about forty evenings and one customer of four years. The price of such a program is not what it costs. What it costs is the deciding the maker left undone, which falls on you, and the months of running your trade in two places while you do it. The first paid eleven pounds a month and one Thursday, because she wrote the job down before she went shopping and bought only the thing that did it.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. Can I finish the sentence for every program I pay for by the month? Write them in a column and finish this line against each: this does ___ for my trade. Where the sentence will not come, you have a decision rather than a tool.
2. How many of my own evenings has it had, and how many more does it want? Count the hours since you bought it, and put against them what an hour of yours is worth. That sum is part of the price and nobody ever showed it to you.
3. Where does next Tuesday live? If the honest answer is two places, you are not part way through a project. You are in the state that costs the most, and longer in it than you meant to be.

The verse:

The program that would do it all asked little by the year,
And took the rest in evenings, which no invoice makes appear.
The plain one did the one plain job and did it in a day,
The tool you cannot finish is the one you always pay.

Until next time. Go and write, in one sentence each, the job of every program you pay for by the month, and put a date this week against any sentence that will not finish.

P.S. Notice what you are shown when such a thing is sold to you. The demonstration is always of a finished arrangement, running smoothly, worked by the man who built it, and it tells you nothing of the distance between where you stand and that picture. Ask how many hours a shop of your size takes to get from the first evening to the state on the screen, and whether he will come and do it. The answer, or the lack of one, is the most useful figure in the transaction.

Also in the archive: The Fortnight in Pencil, Eleven Small Wages and The Book He Stopped Writing In.