The Man Coming on Friday

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, a customer holding two prices and no trade of his own had one instrument left. He would mention the one man to the other, say nothing, and watch what came out.

Two fencers in one town, the same oak posts and the same riven rails.
Both were told a third man would come and price the work on the Friday.
Both spent a quarter of an hour on that third man, and neither told a lie.
One spent it upon what the man was likely to do badly.
The other spent it upon what the man did well, and where the two of them differed.
Which of the two did the farmer afterwards believe about his own work?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two fencers in the town I have never named. Both put in post and rail, both cut their own holes, both owned a rammer and a chalk line. In the autumn a farmer wanted three hundred yards along a new lane where the cattle kept getting through. He had both men out a week apart, and told each the same thing before they had their coats off. There was another man coming over from the far side of the hill to price it on the Friday.

The first fencer went to work on that, and it took him a quarter of an hour in the gateway. The man from over the hill set his posts shallow, and he had seen a run of his go over in a wet March. He put his rails up green, and they shrank from the mortices by the second summer. There had been a business at a farm beyond the crossroads, which he would not go into. Then he gave his figure, twenty-seven pounds, and went home content with the afternoon.

The second fencer heard the same news and said something else. The man from over the hill, he said, hangs a field gate better than anybody this side of the county, and if there were gates in this job the farmer should have him and be glad of it. What he himself did differently was underground and could never be seen afterwards. He set the butts of his posts in tar and put the heart of the oak downward, which took two days and three pounds more and bought a line that stood twenty-five years instead of twelve. If the lane was to be moved inside ten years, there was no sense in paying the three pounds.

The farmer gave the work to the second man, at thirty pounds, and the third man never came on the Friday, because by the Wednesday there was nothing left to price.

Here is the part worth having. Nobody said a word against the first fencer, and his fence would have stood twelve honest years. He lost three hundred yards for what he said about a man who was not in the gateway.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A word against the other man is heard, every time, as a word about you. Not about him. The customer has never met him and cannot check a syllable of it, and has no means of weighing shallow posts against deep ones. What he can weigh is the man in front of him saying it.

Begin with the question he was actually asking, because it was not an invitation to review the trade. A customer who names your rival is asking to be handed a ruler. He has two figures, a hole in his hedge and no way of telling which of you is worth it, and the mention is a plea for a basis of choosing other than the smaller one. Answer with the other man's failings and you have given him no ruler, only a second thing he cannot verify.

Then the mechanism. A listener cannot keep a quality apart from the voice that supplies it. By the evening the farmer remembers two things, that there is careless fencing being done in the district and that something was sour in his own gateway that afternoon, and he files them together. Worse follows. Until he opened his mouth the farmer had no reason to think him an interested party. Afterwards he plainly was one, and every word about his own tar and heartwood came from a man who had just shown he would say whatever served him.

Now the thing to do instead, which happens also to be better selling. State the difference as a thing, a figure and a span of time. Tar and heartwood, three pounds, twenty-five years against twelve. That is checkable, it can be repeated to a wife at supper, and it survives a week of thinking over. Then say out loud the case in which the customer should take the other man, since an honest account of where you lose is the only self-praise a stranger has reason to believe, by the same mechanism as the fault you own up to. That is the ruler he came for, and near relation to teaching a customer to judge your trade, save that here you teach him in the presence of a name.

Do it from a prepared answer and not from your feelings. Three parts, under a minute: one true good word about him, the difference in a figure and a span of years, and the case in which he is the man to have. Write it out while your blood is cool, because the answer you invent on your feet, when a stranger has just named the fellow who took the mill work off you in the spring, will be the resentful one.

Two cautions. Generosity has a limit, and the limit is the truth: praise a real strength, by preference one not at issue in the job in hand, since a man who commends his rival's virtue on the exact point being bought has argued himself out of the work. And do not escape into vagueness, which is no better. We are all good hands round here, you must please yourself, leaves the customer holding what he held before, two numbers and no ruler.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What will you say when the next customer names your nearest rival? Write it down tonight and keep it with your prices. If you cannot say it aloud without an edge coming into your voice, it is not finished.
2. What is he genuinely better at? Name one thing, truthfully. If you cannot, you have not looked at the trade you are in, and you will be unable to describe your own difference either, since a difference requires two things.
3. What does your difference cost, and what does it buy? Put both in figures, pounds and years. A difference stated in adjectives is not a ruler, and the customer will go quietly back to measuring the only thing he can measure.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of the two did the farmer afterwards believe about his own work?

The second, and not because he was the nicer man. To believe a tradesman about his own work you must believe he is not simply working for himself, and the only proof available in a quarter of an hour is a willingness to lose. One of them gave the farmer a reason to hire somebody else, and that is what made the rest of him worth hearing.

The verse:

The first man cried his neighbour down
to make his own case good;
the farmer signed the other man,
who praised him where he could.

Until next time. Go and write the sentence you will say when the next customer names your nearest rival, and make the first half of it true in his favour.

P.S. There is one warning you may always give, and the wording is everything. Speak about the method and never about the man. Posts set in that ground without tar will be loose inside ten years is a fact, and the customer can try a gatepost with his boot. He never tars anything is a complaint, and the only thing it lets him test is the man who made it.

Also in the archive: The Dearer Man, Three Names on the Wall and Let Them Try It.