The One Name He Never Cut

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two masons cut the same letters into the same grey granite, and this once I must lend the town a century it never had.

Two masons in one county, the same granite and the same chisels.
Both were found by the same sort of page, built by the same young man.
Both paid him each January and thought the matter settled there.
One of them knew whose address the renewal notices went to.
One found out on a Thursday in February, his page gone dark.
Which of them owned his trade, and which had been renting it?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two monumental masons, in a town I have never named, though this time the town has telephones in it. Both yards had the same grey granite on the same trestles, both kept their chisels in a canvas roll, and both cut lettering you would be content to have over you. Neither was a fool nor a rogue, which is the only sort of story worth telling. Both were found the same way, by a householder with a burial to arrange searching for a mason in the county and finding a page of photographs, a telephone number and a listing on a map.

Eleven years ago both pages were built by the same young man, a nephew of the first mason and well spoken of. He was quick, he was cheap, and he did a sound job. He registered both names on the internet, set up the mail for both yards, claimed both listings on the map, and in the owner field of every account he put his own address. There was no cunning in it. Somebody had to receive the renewal notices, and he was the only one who would know what they meant. The first mason never asked. An invoice came each January, he paid it, and took the paying to mean the thing was his.

The second mason was told, by a customer standing in his yard with a cap in his hands, that the number on his map listing was the old one. He had changed vans two years before and corrected it on the page, and nobody had thought of the listing. He went in to put it right and could not. The listing wanted a code sent to an address he had never seen.

That evening he wrote out every account his trade now stood upon. The name on the internet, the page itself, the mail, the listing on the map, the page where people set down their opinion of him, the machine that takes cards in the office, and the calendar the funeral directors used for his lettering. Eight, with the book-keeping, for a business of two men and a yard. Beside each he wrote the address to which a forgotten password would be sent. Five went somewhere he could not reach: three to the nephew, one to his daughter's address from the summer she helped with the books, one to a free account whose password had gone off in a stolen telephone. Putting it right cost him nothing but politeness. The nephew was pleased to be asked and did the lot in an afternoon. The mason made himself one mailbox on his own internet name, set it as owner of everything, and left the nephew an administrator, which was all he had ever needed to be.

The nephew took a salaried post in another county, married, and by degrees stopped reading his old mail. There was nothing wrong in that either. Three years on, the renewal notice for the first mason's name went to a mailbox nobody opened, and on a Thursday in February his page stopped answering. Nine days he was off the map and out of the search, in a trade where nobody waits a week, and he could not mend it, because every door to the thing opened with a key in another man's pocket. He had it back after six weeks and a fee. He never learned what the nine days cost him. Nobody comes back to tell you about the burial they gave to somebody else.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Ownership of the things your trade is found by is not settled by who pays for them, but by whose address the password is sent to. Every account holds a quiet field naming an owner, and a quieter one naming the mailbox that receives the resets, and the second is the whole of the matter. A man may pay for nine years and own nothing.

Consider why it stays hidden so long. These accounts ask nothing of you while they are working. You do not log into a domain name, nor into a map listing from one year to the next. The arrangement is tested only on the day you must change or recover something, which is to say on your worst day, when a wrong number stands before every customer in the county, or a page is dark, or the account that takes your money is held over a question you cannot answer.

The mechanism to understand is mail, because all these systems recover the same way. They send a message. Whoever opens that mailbox holds everything attached to it, whatever the invoices say and whatever anybody intended. So the most valuable possession you have in the whole of this is one mailbox on a name you own. Nearly everything else can be replaced at a price. That cannot, and it is what a small trade usually has least hold of, having set it up in a hurry in the first week.

Notice that none of the common cases involves a villain. The web man who registered your name because you asked him for a website. The nephew. The employee who left in good order three summers ago whose address still sits on the advertising. Each was a convenience at the time, and each leaves you holding a thing on loan rather than in your possession, to be discovered at a moment not of your choosing. The paid invoice is the great deceiver, exactly as it is when a tool paid for by the month goes on being paid for. Paying proves only that you are paying.

Two cautions. The first is to go at this as housekeeping and not as the recovery of stolen goods. The man holding your accounts is nearly always doing you a kindness and has had no thought of leverage in his head. Ask plainly, say why, and keep him on as an administrator so nothing he does for you becomes harder. Approached as a thief he will dig in where the same man asked as a friend would have obliged inside the hour. The second caution runs the other way. One mailbox only you can open is a single key to the whole of your trade, and the week you are ill your trade is shut. Have one other person able to reach it, and keep your written list of what is owned where outside the systems it unlocks.

Three questions, and the first takes four minutes:

1. Whose address is in the owner field of your internet name? Not who pays the invoice and not who built the page. Look the name up in the public register and read what it says. If that is not an address you can open, nothing else here matters yet.
2. If every account you depend on sent a password reset tonight, how many would land in a mailbox you can read? Write the accounts out first, the dull ones included. Most trades stand on eight or ten and can name five.
3. Which would hurt within a week if the man who set it up stopped answering tomorrow? Do those and leave the rest for the winter. The one that hurts fastest is rarely the website. It is the thing that takes the money, or the listing a stranger reads before he telephones.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of them owned his trade, and which had been renting it?

The first was renting and did not know it, and paid his rent punctually each January to a man who had never asked to be his landlord. The second owned, from the evening he found out that he did not. A month and a few telephone calls bought back what he had always believed he had, which is the only repair in this letter that can be made at leisure rather than in February with the page dark.

The verse:

He cut the names of other men
In granite, deep and plain,
And never asked whose name was set
On all he stood to gain.

Until next time. Go and look up today who is recorded as the owner of your internet name, and write that answer on a sheet of paper beside the address a password would be sent to.

P.S. Keep that sheet of paper after every account is in your own name, and keep it in plain words a stranger could follow. It is not for you. One day somebody must act for you at a few hours' notice, a partner, a son, a solicitor, and what they will need is not your passwords but the knowledge that these things exist and where to knock. A trade that cannot be taken over in a fortnight is worth less than one that can.

Also in the archive: The Owned Audience: Building a List the Platforms Can't Take, Sent in His Name and The Fortnight in Pencil.