The Fourth and the Fourteenth

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town a printer's mistake was a public thing, since five hundred copies of it went out under other men's doors before anybody noticed.

Two jobbing printers in one town, the same platen press and the same cases of type.
Both were given a corn chandler's sale bill, and both set the fourth where the fourteenth was meant.
Both found it out on the Tuesday, with five hundred bills printed, dried and folded.
Both accounts stood at two pounds ten, and both men were sorry in much the same words.
Same trade, same error, the same chandler and the same Saturday sale.
One of them sent a smaller account. What did the other one send?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two jobbing printers in the town I have never named. Both worked alone with a boy, both on a treadle platen, both buying paper off the same merchant. The corn chandler held two sales a year, one in the spring and one after harvest, and over the years he had given his bill printing to each of them in turn. Five hundred handbills, a quarter sheet, plain bold job letter, two pounds ten the lot, delivered the Wednesday before the sale.

Each man in his turn set the date as the fourth when the fourteenth was meant. It is the most ordinary error in the trade. A one slips out of the stick, the proof is read by the man who set it, the eye supplies what the mind already knows, and the press runs off five hundred of it.

The first printer found it on the Tuesday morning, when the boy brought a folded copy through to be counted. He walked up to the chandler's office that same hour, said plainly what he had done, and offered to take a third off the account. Seventeen shillings, off two pounds ten. The chandler was not a difficult man and did not care to make a scene over a date, so he took the seventeen shillings and sent the bills out as they were, with his man told to say the right day at every door he could manage.

The Saturday was thin. A dozen farmers had come on the fourth and found the yard shut, and a good many of the rest had the wrong day fixed in their heads. The chandler never complained. He had his seventeen shillings and considered the thing settled, and the next spring he asked for a price and then asked whether that was the best the printer could do.

The second printer found his the same way, on the Tuesday of his own season, and did not go up to the office at all. He went to the paper merchant, bought five hundred quarter sheets out of his own pocket at nine shillings, corrected the forme and worked that night, with the boy in at five in the morning to help fold. By seven on the Wednesday there were five hundred correct bills on the counter, which was the hour they had been promised for.

He carried them up himself. He said the first printing had the wrong date in it, that these were right, that the fault was his own and had cost the chandler nothing but the surprise of hearing about it, and that his account would be two pounds ten as agreed. The wrong five hundred he burnt in his own yard.

The chandler paid two pounds ten and told the story twice in the corn market that week, and both times it was a story about a man who had printed all night to keep a promise.

Be fair to the first printer. He found the error himself, he owned it within the hour, he did not argue and he did not hide, and seventeen shillings is real money to hand back out of a one-man shop. His whole error, if you can call it that, was in the currency he chose to pay it in.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

When the fault is your own, pay for it in work and send your account in full, because money off the price is the only apology a customer keeps in writing. The night and the nine shillings of paper were gone by Wednesday and never mentioned again. The seventeen shillings went on being mentioned for years, every time that chandler looked at a figure and wondered what it might come down to.

Begin with what a price is. It is not arithmetic, it is a statement about what the work is worth. Take a third off and you have made a second statement, in your own hand and on your own billhead, that the work was worth a third less than you said. Your customer has no instrument for telling which of the two figures was the true one, and he keeps the lower, because the lower is the one you volunteered. A reduction that carries a plain and dated reason with it can be given without much harm. The trouble with this one is that its reason has no date and no end. Mild winters pass. Being wrong does not expire.

Then consider what the man actually wanted, which was five hundred bills with the right day on them, on the Wednesday. Money off answers a question he never asked, since nobody orders a thing in order to pay less for the wrong version of it. A reduction is compensation for a loss, and compensation is what you reach for once a loss can no longer be undone. While it can still be undone, undo it. That is the same instinct as carrying the risk yourself instead of taking money off the price, turned round and applied after the event.

Now the arithmetic, which surprises people. Putting the work right costs you what the work costs you: materials and hours out of an evening you had not sold to anybody. Taking money off costs you margin, which is the smaller part of the figure. On that two pounds ten, call the paper, ink and the boy eleven shillings, and the rest is the man himself, so seventeen shillings off came entirely out of the part he lives on. Printing it again cost nine shillings and a night of sleep. The cheaper remedy was also the one that gave the customer what he had ordered.

Then there is what gets said about you afterwards. A reduction is a transaction, and transactions are forgotten, or worse, remembered as the moment your prices were found to be movable. A night's work is an event, and events get told. The second printer asked nobody to repeat anything, and the repeating took care of itself.

Two cautions. Making good must arrive in time to be of use. A reprint delivered after the sale is a worse answer than money, since it costs you the paper and leaves the customer his loss entire, and where the day has gone past, money is the only remedy left to you. Give it whole and at once in that case, measured against his loss and not against your account. The second caution is that all this holds only where the fault is genuinely yours. Work done again for a customer who has changed his mind is not a remedy, it is an alteration nobody has priced, and a shop that treats the two as one thing will find itself wrong remarkably often. Say which of the two it is, out loud, at the time.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What did my last three errors cost me, and in which currency did I pay? Add up this year's credit notes and knocked-down invoices, then set beside that sum what it would have cost in materials and your own hours to do each of those jobs again properly.
2. Which of my faults can be put right in time, and which cannot? That is decided far better on a quiet Tuesday than in a doorway with a customer in front of you. Write it down: what I do again at my own cost, and the one case where I give money instead.
3. Who else in my shop may promise the remedy without asking me first? A remedy is worth little once it is slow, and nothing slows one like a rule that it must wait for the master to be free. Name the sum below which anybody may put it right and tell you after.

The Answer to the Riddle

One of them sent a smaller account. What did the other one send?

Five hundred fresh bills with the right date on them, delivered by seven on the Wednesday morning as promised, paid for out of his own pocket, and with them his account for two pounds ten, not a penny off it.

The first printer paid seventeen shillings and left the fault standing in the world. The second paid nine shillings and a night, and left nothing standing but the price he had asked for in the first place.

The verse:

One sold his price to mend his fault
and kept the fault as well;
one burnt the sheets and set them new
and had a tale to tell.

Until next time. Go and find the last job you took money off because something had gone wrong at your end, work out what it would have cost to do that job again instead, and write the rule on a card before the next one.

P.S. Sometimes the customer gets in first and asks for money off before you have offered anything. Answer with the remedy and hold the money back. Tell him what you will do, by when, and that there will be nothing on the account for it. Most people take the work, since the work is what they wanted when they placed the order. The money should appear only if the remedy is refused or has become impossible, and never in the same breath as the repair, because a reduction offered alongside a repair stops being an apology and becomes the opening figure in a haggle.

Also in the archive: One Joint in Twenty, The Good Iron on the Axle and The Hot July.