The Parted Seam

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, in the saddler's yard, where a farmer has arrived with a harness that has parted at the stitching and a temper he is holding in.

Two saddlers see one seam give way,
Same stitch, same hide, same rainy day.
One proves the fault lay with the man,
One says: my stitching. Here's my hand.
One farmer left, one farmer stayed.
Which saddler won? And what was paid?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two saddlers in the town I've never named, and their work, in the old chorus, was equally sound. Both good men, both careful, and both had a seam part on them that spring, as happens to everybody in a trade where things are used.

The first was in the right, and that is the important part of this story. He examined the harness and could see the strap had been hung wet on a nail all winter, which rots a stitch faster than any use, and he said so, courteously, and pointed out that the work was eight months old and his guarantee ran to six.

Every word of it was true and none of it did him any good whatever.

The farmer paid for the repair and went away with a story, and the story he told was not that he had hung the harness wet, since a man does not tell that version. It was that the saddler had argued with him about a seam that came apart.

And here is the peculiar arithmetic of it. Being right cost him about four shillings of repair work saved and perhaps forty pounds of trade over the next decade, because a story about an argument travels, and travels particularly well among men standing about in a market with time on their hands.

The second saddler had the same conversation available to him, and did not have it.

He looked at the seam, said that it should not have gone whatever the winter had done to it, took it into the shop, restitched the whole strap rather than the failed inch, and had it back on the farmer's cart by the evening at no charge. He said one further thing, which cost him nothing and was the most valuable sentence of the exchange: I have started waxing that seam differently since the spring, so this will not happen to the next one.

The farmer had come in braced for an argument, since he was half expecting to be told about the nail, and instead had his harness mended by supper. What he had was not a repaired strap. He had a story with a shape to it, and he told it for years, and every man who heard it understood something about that saddler that no sign could have told them.

The second saddler was not softer than the first. He simply understood that he had been handed a rare and expensive opportunity, which is that a customer only finds out what you do when something goes wrong, and until then he is guessing.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Nobody knows what you are like until something goes wrong, so a failure is the only occasion on which your character can actually be demonstrated. Everything else you say about reliability is a claim, made in advance, by an interested party. The mended seam is evidence. And evidence acquired at your own expense is the sort that gets repeated, which is why a job that went wrong and was put right generates more talk than a hundred jobs that went smoothly.

Which turns the usual instinct inside out. When the seam parts, the question that arrives first is whose fault it is, and the answer is often genuinely yours to win. Winning it is nearly always the expensive choice. Not because you should pretend to be at fault when you are not, but because the four shillings are small, the story is large, and the customer standing in your yard is not conducting an inquiry, he is finding out what sort of firm he has been dealing with.

So the shape of a good answer is simple and it is chiefly about speed and completeness. Answer the same day, since delay is read as reluctance. Do more than the minimum, which means the whole strap rather than the failed inch, because the minimum is what an unwilling man does. Skip the apportioning of blame entirely unless the customer insists. And say what you have changed so it will not recur, which converts an apology into a piece of information and is the sentence people remember.

Two boundaries, since this can be taken too far. It does not mean surrendering to anybody who complains, and the innkeeper's rule still stands for the customer who has made a habit of it. And it is a different matter from the public reply to a one-star review, which is written for the audience; this happens in a yard, with one man, and is written for him alone, which is why it works.

Three questions, and think of the last thing that went wrong:

1. How long did you take to answer? Count the hours between hearing and acting. Anything past a day has already told the customer how willing you are, whatever you eventually do.
2. Did you do the minimum or the whole strap? Look at what you actually put right. The failed inch is a repair; the whole strap is the thing that gets talked about, and the difference in cost is usually trivial.
3. What did you change afterwards, and did you say so? If nothing, the customer has an apology and no reason to believe it will not recur. One sentence about what you now do differently is worth more than any amount of regret.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which saddler won?

The one who paid for a repair he did not owe, which sounds like losing and was not. His rival won the argument, kept his four shillings, and bought a story he could not answer, told by a man who had every reason to tell his own version of it. Nobody in that market ever heard about the nail. What they heard was that one saddler argues about seams and the other one restitches the whole strap by evening, and that is the entire difference between the two accounts.

The verse:

Be right, and prove it, and be poor,
For arguments walk out the door.
Mend it by dusk, and mend it whole,
And he will tell the tale for you.

Until next time. Go and look at whatever went wrong last, and put it right further than you have to, this week rather than next.

P.S. Keep a note of what you mend and why. A year of those notes will show you the two or three faults that account for most of your trouble, and mending those at the source is worth more than any amount of gracious behaviour after the event, however well it reads in a letter like this one.

Also in the archive: The One-Star Reply, The Box of Offcuts and Rot Behind the Boards.