The Chalk Behind the Door

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town every tradesman could tell you to the hour how long he worked, and not within a day how he had spent it.

Two tinsmiths in the town I have never named, the same tinplate and the same soldering irons.
Both opened at six and shut at eight, and neither of them idled an hour in the fortnight.
One knew where his week went, or believed he did, and said the talkers at his counter ate it.
The other chalked a mark on the back of his door at every half hour for a fortnight together.
By Lady Day the second was turning out a third more ware in the very same hours.
Same trade, same irons, same thirteen hours a day. How?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two tinsmiths, then, in the town I have never named. Both made pans, candle moulds, milk cans and the gutter lengths that went up ladders in October, and both bought tinplate from the same ironmonger on the same terms. Both opened at six and shut at eight with an hour in the middle, which over a fortnight of six-day weeks comes to a hundred and fifty-six hours, and both worked all of it.

The first could tell you what was wrong with his trade. He lost his week, he said, to the people who came in to talk, the town having a dozen of them and his counter being warm in February. He set himself to cure it, and did cure it, over the better part of a year. He grew short at the counter and kept his back to the door. The talkers went elsewhere, and so in time did many of the enquiries they had been carrying about with them. He had gained four hours a fortnight, lost rather more in work, and was not a pleasanter man.

The second did one thing differently, and it cost him a stub of chalk. He drew three columns on the back of his shop door: I for the iron in his hand, W for walking and waiting, O for all else. At every half hour, when the church clock sounded, he made a mark in whichever column had held the most of the last thirty minutes. He did not grade it or explain it, and kept it a fortnight, the bad week with the wrong gutter order in it.

Then he added it up, and the figures were not those he would have given a fortnight earlier. Fifty-eight hours with the iron in his hand, out of a hundred and fifty-six. Twenty-six walking out to measure and deliver. Twenty-four at the counter and the books. Twenty-one fetching tinplate and solder, waiting to be served, or standing idle for want of a sheet. Seventeen setting up and putting away, eleven separate times, no two jobs in a row wanting the same tools. Ten he could not account for.

So the counter was not his trouble. The talkers cost him under two hours a week, and brought him work. The dear item was the fetching and the waiting, and behind it the settings-up, both of one cause: he kept a thin stock and worked in the order of arrival. He began buying tinplate and solder by the month rather than by the job, and grouped like work together, moulds on a Tuesday and gutters on a Thursday. That was the whole reform, and the hours it returned went onto the bench.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Your account of your own week is honest and wrong, because the hours leave in pieces too small to remember, and the pieces you do remember are the ones that annoyed you rather than the ones that took the time. Both tinsmiths would have sworn to their account of the fortnight, and only one had counted. The other was not deceiving you. He reported what memory had kept, and memory keeps badly.

Consider what it keeps: the sharp thing, the thing with feeling attached. One conversation with a man who would not leave is stored whole, with the weather in it. Eleven walks to the back shop for a sheet of tinplate are stored as nothing whatever, nothing having happened on any of them. Yet they are the greater sum, and will be again next fortnight. That is the arithmetic of a fault paid in instalments too small to be worth stopping for, and the instalments are never stopped because none is large enough to be remembered.

Memory does a second thing, and it is worse. It gives you the week you intended. The morning you were kept until nine at the ironmonger's does not amend the account; it is filed as an interruption to the real week rather than as the week itself. A year of such mornings makes a man who believes he lives at his bench and has the output of one who is there a third of the time, and who concludes that he must work longer hours, the one remedy never available to him.

A count does two things that thinking cannot. It gathers small losses into one number, the only shape a loss can be acted upon in: twenty-one hours is a fact a man will change his buying for, where a quarter of an hour at the ironmonger's is a fact nobody ever changed anything for. And it tells you which reform to make, where without it you reform what you resent, which is rarely what is dear.

Two cautions. The counting alters the thing counted, so keep it long enough for your ordinary habits to return: a fortnight, not two days, and the fortnight you are given rather than a representative one, which never arrives. And keep it coarse. Three columns and a mark at the half hour survive to the end, where a system of minutes and categories is abandoned on the Thursday. Then change one thing, because you can only carry one change at a time.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What do I believe is eating my week? Write the answer on a slip of paper today, before counting anything, and put it away. The distance between that slip and the figures a fortnight hence is the whole value of the thing.
2. Which of my losses are repetitions? Count the times before the minutes. A thing that happens eleven times a fortnight can be designed out of your week. A thing that happened once was weather.
3. What does an hour at the bench earn, and what does an hour of fetching earn? You know the first figure. The second is nought, and nought multiplied by twenty-one is your argument for keeping a month of materials in the back shop.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same trade, same irons, same thirteen hours a day, and by Lady Day the second was turning out a third more ware. How?

Because the first knew what was wrong with his week and the second counted it. The first spent a year curing the complaint he could remember, which cost him four hours and brought him work. The second found, in chalk, that he lost thirty-eight hours to materials he might have bought by the month and jobs he might have grouped. The extra ware came of neither longer hours nor faster hands.

The verse:

You know the hour you open and you know the hour you shut,
But not the quiet quarter hours the fetching and the waiting cut.
So chalk a mark at every bell and let the fortnight tell you plain,
For what you merely think you lose you will go on losing again.

Until next time. Go and chalk three columns on the back of a door and make your first mark before noon.

P.S. The same blindness works the other way about. Ask a man which part of his trade makes his money and he will name the work he enjoys, or was praised for last. Count it, and the money is very often in the dull repeated job he would give an apprentice tomorrow.

Also in the archive: The Price of an Hour, The Hour Nobody Claimed and The Shutter at Seven.