The Copy He Never Needed

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Not the old town this time but a town of your own century, where two window cleaners gave up their pocket books in the same spring, and one of them spent twenty minutes on a thing he had no use at all for until the fourth year.

Two window cleaners in one town, the same ladders and scrims, the same van, the same nine hundred houses.
Both gave up the pocket book that spring and put the whole round into the same arrangement on a screen.
Both had their day set out for them each morning, and neither wrote a name on paper again.
One, in his first week, pressed the button that sends the round back to you as a file, and opened it to see what was inside.
One never pressed it, and kept the better round of the two for four years together.
When the terms changed, why was only one of them free to say no?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two window cleaners, in a town I have never named and a century I have never seen. Both out before it was properly light in February, breath going up in the cold, the top of a ladder ringing against a sill, a scrim gone stiff in the bucket. Both knew which houses had the dog that came round the side, which gate stuck, which widow liked to be told the day before, and which road wanted doing on a Friday because of the market. Neither was the better workman and neither was the better man.

That spring both of them gave up the pocket book, which had served well enough and had got wet once too often. In its place both took the same arrangement, the sort of thing a man pays a few pounds a month for, which holds the round, puts the right dozen houses on the screen each morning, remembers what each one pays and when it was last done, and sends the bill off on the Friday without being asked. It was a good tool. I want that understood before we go on. Both men got an hour of their evening back, and if you had asked either of them in the second year whether it had been worth the money he would have laughed at the question.

The difference was twenty minutes in the first week. The first window cleaner, having put four years of round into somebody else's keeping, went looking for the way back out. He found a button, pressed it, and a file came down onto the machine in his kitchen. He opened it. The names were there, the roads were there, the prices were there, the dates of the last visit were there. The notes were not. Four years of small knowledge, the dog and the gate and the widow and the Friday road, had been typed into a box the file did not carry. So he started a habit that cost him about an hour every three months: he pressed the button, opened what came down, put the notes into a column of his own beside it, and kept the thing on a small drive in a drawer at home. He never once needed it.

The second window cleaner never pressed it. He was not idle about the tool, quite the opposite. He learned it better than his rival did, used the parts of it the other man never touched, and sent out a tidier bill. If you had stood in both vans you would have said his round was the better kept.

In the fourth year a letter came to both of them. The arrangement had been sold, the new owners were putting the price up by rather a lot, and there would be ninety days before the change took effect. The first man read it on the Tuesday, looked at two other arrangements over the following week, decided one of them would do, and told the new owners so. They offered him the old price for two years to keep him. He stayed, and paid less than his rival, and the whole business cost him an evening. The second man read the same letter and discovered, with three weeks gone, that the file he could get out held names and roads and prices and nothing whatever about the dog, the gate, the widow or the Friday road. He spent eleven evenings in November copying the notes off a screen into a sheet of his own, by hand, nine hundred times, in the dark part of the year when he was already tired. Then he paid the new price, because by then he had no appetite left for the question.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A record you have never once taken out of the machine that keeps it is not in your possession, it is on loan. It may be an excellent loan on generous terms from an honest lender. It is still a loan, and you do not know what you own until you have had it in your hands.

The mechanism is the twenty minutes, and what the twenty minutes bought was not the file. Files go stale. It bought the knowledge of what the file leaves out, at a moment when that knowledge cost nothing and could be acted upon slowly. Every tool that holds your trade for you holds some of it in a shape that comes away clean and some of it in a shape that does not, and nobody will tell you which is which, because nobody has been asked. The bare bones of a customer list nearly always come away. The small knowledge rarely does: the notes, the history of what was done and when, the pictures, the messages, the reviews, the four years of to and fro that are the actual relationship. A man finds this out either on a quiet Tuesday in his first week or in the dark part of November with three weeks to run.

The second thing in it, and the one that pays even when nothing ever goes wrong, is what the knowledge does to your conduct while you stay. A man who knows he can leave commits properly. He puts the whole round in, uses the tool to its limit, lets it do the work it is good at. A man who suspects he is trapped hedges. He keeps a bit back, maintains a shadow book he half trusts, and so gets the cost of the tool without the benefit of it, which is the worst of both arrangements and the subject of a letter I have already written. The free man is the wholehearted user. That is the part of this nobody expects.

You will hear the case put as a warning about wicked suppliers, and that is its weakest form. Most of them are decent and intend to go on being decent. The trouble arrives by other roads entirely: the firm is sold, the terms are revised, the cheap plan is withdrawn, a feature you depend on is retired, your own account goes wrong on a bank holiday, or you simply outgrow the thing. None of that requires anybody to behave badly. It requires only that your trade be held in one place you have never tested, which is the single gate I have warned you about before, wearing different clothes.

Two cautions. First, an export you have not opened is not an export. The button that produces a file tells you nothing. Open the file, read it, and go hunting specifically for the three things you would miss most, because the gap is never where you expect it and is always in the part you did not pay for. Second, do not let the copy become a second working book. The man who starts keeping his round in two places has swapped one trouble for a worse one. The copy is a dead thing, refreshed on a known interval, kept somewhere else and never worked from. It is a fire escape, not a second door you use daily.

Three questions, and the first wants doing this week:

1. If the tool you most depend on stopped on Friday, what could you not write out again? Name it precisely. Not the software, the records. The customer list, the job history, the photographs of finished work, the messages, the standing arrangements. The answer is usually shorter than people fear and more important than they think.
2. Where is the button, and have you pressed it? Twenty minutes, this week, on the tool that holds the most. Find the way to get your own records out, use it, open what comes down, and keep the result somewhere that is not inside the thing it came from. Put a note in the diary to do it again in three months.
3. What did the file leave behind? Compare what came out against what is on the screen and write down the difference. That difference is your actual exposure, and once it is written down you can decide what to do about it in your own time, which is the only time worth deciding anything in.

The Answer to the Riddle

When the terms changed, why was only one of them free to say no?

Because one of them had walked through the door before he needed to, and a door you have walked through is a door you know opens. He had his round in his own hands and the knowledge of what the arrangement would and would not give back, so a letter putting the price up was a decision to be weighed over a week rather than a wall to be run at. He chose to stay, which looks from the outside exactly like having no choice at all, and is the opposite of it. His rival kept the better round, learned the tool better, and arrived at the same letter with nothing in his hands but eleven evenings of copying out and the price he was given.

The verse:

The ledger in another's keeping serves you very well,
Until the day the keeping changes hands.
Take out your own while there is light and nothing to compel,
And every bargain after that is one that you command.

Until next time. Go and find the export button on the one tool that holds most of your trade, press it today, and open what comes down.

P.S. The same test is worth running on the place your customers find you. Ask yourself who holds the list of people you can speak to tomorrow morning without permission, and whether you could carry that list across the road if you had to. A man with ten thousand followers and no addresses has a wonderful shop on a street he does not own, and he will not discover the terms of his tenancy until the day they are changed on him.

Also in the archive: The Book He Stopped Writing In, The Fortnight in Pencil and The Cooper and the Single Gate.