The Message Nobody Missed

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Not the old town this time but a town of your own century, where two tree surgeons took their work through a form on a page and never once thought about it.

Two tree surgeons in one town, the same ropes and irons, the same chipper, the same van.
Both took their enquiries through a form on a page that sent to a telephone in a pocket.
Both had a full spring, and in August both pages were tidied up by the men who keep them.
One carried on as before, and when the autumn came in thin he said the market had gone off.
One filled in his own form on the first Monday of every month and waited to hear it arrive.
Why was only one of them able to say what sort of autumn he had actually had?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two tree surgeons, in a town I have never named and a century I have never seen. Ropes coiled wet in the back of the van, a chipper that fills a street with the smell of cut laurel, sawdust in the cuffs of a jacket that is never quite dry. Both were good. Either could take forty feet off a lime overhanging a conservatory and leave the lawn as he found it.

Both got their work the same way. A householder looks at a leaning ash in October, finds a page, writes three lines into a form and presses the button. The form thanks her. A telephone chirps in a pocket, and a man standing in a chip pile reads her name and her road. Both answered inside the hour, having understood years ago that the first man to reply is usually the man who gets the job.

In August both pages were tidied up, one brought up to date by the man who built it and one moved to a cheaper arrangement promising the same for less. Both jobs took an afternoon, both pages came back rather better, and both men glanced at them, liked them, and went back to the trees. One form went on working. The other did not, and there was no sign of it. The page looked right, the form took its three lines, and when a householder pressed the button it thanked her warmly and said she would hear within the day. Then it put her name nowhere at all. She waited two days, thought him rude, and rang the other man.

The first surgeon's autumn was thin from the second week of September, and he is not a man who sits still. He decided the market had gone off, which everybody he drank with confirmed. He decided his rival had gone in cheap, and took eighty pounds off a crown reduction to meet it. He had six hundred leaflets printed and walked them round the better roads over two wet evenings. They sent fourteen householders to his page, where the form thanked every one and told nobody. By the end of October he had spent money, cut his prices and worked harder than in any autumn of his life, with the diary emptier than in four years.

He found it in November, by accident. A woman rang about a dead elm and mentioned that she had written twice and heard nothing, in the mild way people use when they have already excused you. He sat in the van, filled in his own form, and watched his pocket stay silent. Eleven weeks, somewhere near sixty enquiries, and a season he had not lost to the market or to a rival.

The second surgeon's August had gone the same way, and he found it on the eighth of September. On the first Monday of each month he filled in his own form as a householder would, with a line in the message so he would know it when it came, and waited for the chirp. Four minutes. Be fair to the first man, who was neither the lazier of the two nor the more trusting. He had simply never had the thought that a thing which has worked every day for three years can stop without stopping, and go on looking exactly like itself.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A man who stops doing your work complains, or is complained of, but a machine that stops doing it looks precisely as it did the day you set it going, so every automatic thing you own needs some arrangement that proves to you it ran. That is the whole of it, and it is not a lesson about forms. Forms are merely the cheapest place to learn it.

The reason sits in the shape of the evidence. Hand work to a person and failure arrives as noise. He is late, or ill, or sheepish, or a customer rings up cross. You may not like the news, but you get it. Hand the same work to a machine and failure arrives as nothing whatever: no gap on a shelf, no letter returned, no awkward conversation. The only trace is a number that went down, and numbers go down for a dozen innocent reasons, so you reach for the nearest. The market, the weather, a rival, all of them always available and never checkable.

Worse, the only witnesses are people you cannot hear, since the householder who got no reply does not write again to complain of not being written to, and the customer who fails to reach you leaves no trace at all. Notice too that nothing in his business had to be touched for any of it to happen. Something upstream of him changed, in an afternoon, by a man doing his job properly, which is the particular condition of trading with machines in your century. So "I have not changed anything" is no evidence. It says only that you were not watching when it changed.

The remedy is the second surgeon's, and the useful thing about it is how small it is. Be a customer of your own business on a date, not when you feel uneasy, because the unease arrives eleven weeks late. Go in by the front door: fill in your own form, make your own booking, buy the smallest thing you sell, read your own reminder as a customer gets it. Then keep one count where you cannot avoid seeing it. The count is the better instrument for volume, since a form half broken, taking two enquiries in five, passes any test you send it and shows plainly in a monthly figure. The test is the better instrument for the path, since no count tells you that what the customer receives has been thanking her and telling nobody.

Two cautions. First, do not set out to watch everything, or you will watch nothing within the month. Sort your arrangements by one question: if this stopped tonight, would anybody tell me? Your van tells you. Your till tells you. What does not tell you is whatever stands between a stranger and a reply, and there are rarely more than four or five of those. Second, a proof you have learned to ignore is worse than none, since it buys the feeling of having checked. A daily report nobody opens is not a safeguard, it is furniture. One number a month, in your own hand where last month's is still visible, catches more than any quantity of automatic reassurance.

Three questions, and the first wants doing before you go to bed:

1. If it stopped tonight, who would tell you? List every automatic thing standing between a stranger and a reply from you: the form, the booking, the reminder, the message that goes out when you cannot answer. Against each, name who would tell you it had stopped. Where you cannot name anybody, you have found tonight's work.
2. When were you last a customer of your own business? Not a glance at the page, which shows you nothing. Go in by the front door as a stranger does and take it to the end, then put the day in next month's diary before you forget what you learned this one.
3. How many enquiries came in last month, and how many the month before? If you cannot say within five, you have no instrument at all, and a thin autumn will be explained to you by whoever you happen to be standing next to.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why was only one of them able to say what sort of autumn he had actually had?

Because one had arranged to be told and the other had arranged to be trusting. The same tidying in August, the same broken path, the same silence after it. In one shop the silence was treated as news and tested on the first Monday. In the other it was taken for the market, and the market fought at some expense for eleven weeks. A machine does not lie to you. It says nothing, and nothing is the one message you will always translate in your own favour.

The verse:

The man who leaves your work undone will grumble, or be caught,
The engine leaves it just as well, and leaves it looking right.
No letter comes to tell you so, no stranger writes you twice,
So go in by your own front door and prove the thing by sight.

Until next time. Go and fill in your own enquiry form as a stranger would, and sit with your telephone until the message arrives.

P.S. The same blindness runs the other way and costs more quietly. A machine will go on doing a thing long after the reason for it has gone: the note about a service you no longer offer, the reminder sent to people who finished with you in spring, the charge taken monthly for something nobody has opened since. Nothing complains, so nothing is reviewed. Whatever you set going, write down a date to look at it again, and write it at the hour you set it going, since you will never again be so clear about why it exists.

Also in the archive: The Fortnight in Pencil, One Pot in Seven and The Boy Minding the Shop.