The Book He Stopped Writing In

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Not the old town this time but a town of your own century, where two piano tuners bought the same program in March, and only one of them finished buying it.

Two piano tuners in one town, the same round of a hundred and forty instruments.
Both bought the same program in March, to hold the dates, the customers and what was agreed.
Both kept the ruled book they had written in for eleven years, because a man likes a thing he can hold.
One went on writing in both, and could answer any question you put to him, given the evening.
One chose a Monday, carried across what mattered, and never wrote in the book again.
Why did the second man's ninety October reminders go out in a week when he was not there at all?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two piano tuners, in a town I have never named and a century I have never seen. The felt, the lever, the long cold wait in a front room while somebody finds the key to the back gate. A hundred and forty instruments apiece: school halls, two chapels, a dancing academy, and a great many uprights that are tuned because a child has started lessons and stop being tuned when the child stops. Both were good. Either could leave a sixty-year-old upright sounding better than the household deserved.

What a tuner carries is not only a lever. It is when each instrument was last done, what it wants watching for next time, the pin that will not hold, the agreed figure, and which house has the dog that must be shut in the kitchen first.

In March both bought the same thing: a program that keeps the appointments, holds a customer and a note against each one, and sends a reminder when a year has gone by.

The first tuner put his appointments into it and went on writing in the ruled book as well. He was not careless. The book had served eleven years, and no program had yet earned that. So the dates lived on the screen, the notes about the instruments lived in the book, the telephone numbers lived in the telephone, and the figures agreed lived in sent messages. Nothing was lost. Every single thing could be found. Ask him on a Sunday evening what the chapel organist had said about the sticking middle C, and he would find it for you, and he would be right.

In July he tuned the same morning twice over, because one appointment had gone into the book and the other into the program. In August he rang a customer to ask what he had already been told in February and written down somewhere, and the customer remembered telling him. Neither time did anybody make a fuss, which is the trouble with this sort of fault. The real bill came in October, his month, when a hundred instruments fall due at once. He knew that. He could not send the note, because the dates sat in two places and no evening was long enough to marry them up. So he tuned for the people who happened to remember him, and told himself October was quieter than it used to be.

The second tuner spent one Monday evening and part of a second. He settled first what a record had to hold, which took twenty minutes and a cup of tea: when it was last tuned, what the instrument needs next time, the figure agreed, and how to get in. Then he carried across the live customers only, two years' worth, and left fifteen years of history where it lay. Then he put the ruled book on the shelf, where it could be read and not written in. For a fortnight his hand went to it anyway, perhaps twenty times, and he made himself stop.

By October his October was a list. Ninety instruments a year due, each with an address and a figure against it. The note went out on the Tuesday of a week he spent on the coast, sent by the woman who takes his calls, who by then could tell a caller herself when they were last seen and what had been said about the middle C, because there was one screen to look at and no need to ring him to be sure.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Information kept in two places is worth less than the same information kept in one, because a record you must check against another record is not a record at all. It is a suggestion, and nobody runs a trade on suggestions.

See what the second place actually costs. It is never the writing, which is ten seconds. It is that every question now has a step in front of it: which of my two accounts is the later one. Ten seconds and a small doubt, and because both are trifling, nobody ever objects to them. But a lookup with a doubt attached is a lookup you begin to avoid, and what you do instead is ask the customer again. That is where a filing habit becomes something your customers can feel, because being asked twice is how a person finds out he is not remembered.

Then there is the handing over. A record split across a book, a screen and a telephone has an index, and the index is your own head. Nobody else can use it, which means the whole of it is useless to the only person who could give you an afternoon off. A thing is only yours to grow if it is repeatable and teachable, and two books are neither, whatever either one contains.

And note which work dies first. One question survives a split record, because you can always search two places for one fact. What cannot survive is work that needs the whole list at once: the October reminder, the note to everyone unseen in two years, the count of what a school is worth against a front room. Those are precisely the jobs that bring work in without a customer having to think of you, and they are abandoned quietly, for a reason that sounds like not having the time.

Now the counsel that runs the other way, and it is sensible counsel badly applied: keep the paper, because systems fail and a book cannot be locked out of itself. The failure it guards against is real. But it confuses a copy with a second place of entry. A copy is written once and never added to: an export taken each month, the week's rounds printed on a Monday morning. Those cost you nothing, because no new fact is ever born in them. What ruins you is two books both of which are allowed to be right. Keep every backup you like. Allow one place where a new fact may be written down.

Two cautions. First, carry across only what you will consult. The temptation is to move fifteen years in order to lose nothing, and a changeover that needs four evenings is abandoned on the third. Two years of live customers is the whole of it, and the old book stays on the shelf as history, open to read and closed to entry. Second, one place of record does not mean one program for the entire trade. The test is one place for each question, not one machine for everything, and the trader who buys a single system to run his quotes, his accounts, his diary and his stock tends to end with four he half uses rather than one he trusts.

Three questions, and the first can be settled this evening with a sheet of paper:

1. Which facts about a customer do you presently keep in two places? Write the question, then both places, for the four or five things you look up most. Any line with two answers on it is a decision you have been putting off.
2. If you were in bed on Monday, could somebody else tell a caller when they were last seen, what was agreed and what to bring? If the honest answer is that they would ring you, the record is in your head and the rest is decoration.
3. What is the date you stop writing in the old one? Not the date you start the new one, which you have already done. The changeover only ever ends on the day the old book is closed, and until you name that day it does not end.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why did the second man's ninety October reminders go out in a week when he was not there at all? Because he had one list and the other man had the same facts spread over four. Both men knew everything about their rounds. Only one of them kept it somewhere that could be used by a person who was not him, on a day he was not working, for a job that needed all of it at once.

The verse:

One man wrote in book and screen and lost not one thing twice,
One man chose a Monday night and paid the moving price,
The first could answer any note if you would wait till ten,
The second sent his October out and never touched a pen.

Until next time. Go and write down the four things every customer record in your trade must hold, and name the one place they will live from Monday.

P.S. Do the moving in a quiet week and expect the first fortnight to feel slower, because it will be. The hand goes to the old book, finds nothing in it, and that small irritation is the entire price of the change. It is paid once. A trader who tries to pay it in his busiest month concludes that the new way is slower than the old, and he is right for about ten days and wrong for the ten years after.

Also in the archive: The Fortnight in Pencil, Settled in February and The Coal Man's Little Book.