The Pencil in the Margin

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, in the November when the corner premises by the market changed hands, two joiners were asked to price the fitting out of the shop.

Two joiners, the same shop, the same deal and mahogany,
The same brass, the same glass, the same six cold weeks to work in.
Both were sound men, and both wrote an honest figure.
One sent a list of eleven lines, each with its price against it.
One sent a page describing the finished shop, and one sum at the foot.
Which of the two was paid what he asked?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two joiners in the town I've never named, both shopfitters with a bench and a lad. The grocer at the corner premises wanted the inside made new before the Christmas trade: a counter the length of the room, drawers to the ceiling, a glazed front, shelving along both walls. Six weeks, in the worst of the cold. It is a job of many parts and only one that signifies, which is whether the drawers still run sweetly in a wet January. The rest can be judged from the doorway. That cannot.

The first joiner wrote his estimate as an honest man does, setting out his workings so anybody might check them. Deal for the carcasses. Mahogany for the counter and the drawer fronts. Brass. Glass. Paint. Carting from his yard. Twenty-two days of his own time at his day rate, and the lad's at the lad's. Eleven lines and a total ruled off beneath. He believed it proved he had not plucked the figure from the air.

The grocer read it on the Monday with a pencil in his hand, which is what lists are for. Nothing in it was dishonest, and every line invited an opinion. His wife's cousin had a cart standing idle, so the carting came out. He bought glass from a man he dealt with, so the glass came out. Painting was painting, and the nephew could paint. There was sound timber in the old fittings, so why buy new deal. Would the joiner do the carcasses and the mahogany only, the rest being found elsewhere, and might the rate come down, the job being smaller now?

The joiner took it, because it was November and the six weeks stood empty in his book. So he fitted a shop out of other men's materials. The glass came late and out of true, the old boards were wormed, and he had to say so on the one Tuesday when saying so sounded like an excuse. The nephew painted over dust. He earned less than half his first figure, and the grocer said for years that having the place fitted had been a trial.

The second joiner spent his Sunday on a different page. He wrote down the shop. The counter, its length and depth and the lip along the front so a coin cannot roll off. The drawers, how many, and that they would run in January as well as in June. Swept, and the shavings gone, by the second Saturday in December. He wrote more about the work than his rival had, and about money one line: a figure at the foot, and under it a sentence saying that whatever was not described above was not included.

The grocer found nothing on that page he could take a pencil to, so he did the only other thing a man can do with a price, which is hold it against what the thing is worth to him. He agreed it at the figure asked. Be fair to the first joiner: he was concealing nothing, and that was exactly his difficulty.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A price divided into parts will be judged part by part, and every part a customer can price for himself is a part he can take away from you. He is not being mean. He is doing the only arithmetic you have left him. He has never bought a fitted shop and cannot say what one should cost, but he knows what a cart costs and what paint costs, so he goes down your list striking out what he recognises and leaving you what he does not.

Notice which lines survive the pencil. Never the ones your skill hides in, because those he cannot picture. The lines he takes away are the ones he can see himself arranging, and an imagined thing is always cheap, since it holds nothing the man does not know about. His picture of the painting has no dust in it. It is the instinct that makes a householder think he will have a go himself, except that you handed him the list to work from. He has priced his idea of your work, then asked you to do the rest at the rate you quoted for the whole.

A price for a finished thing has something outside your trade to be weighed against: the Christmas trade, twenty years of mornings. Eleven figures have nothing to be weighed against but the man's notion of what each ought to cost, and that judges you on the cheapest work you do.

Be especially careful of your own days. A day rate is the line a customer is certain he understands, and it turns a trade into a quantity of time. Every hour saved by twenty years of learning then shows as a reduction in your price, and you have arranged, in writing, to be paid for the doing alone.

Two cautions. First, describe the work in greater detail than the man with the list, not less, since what you withhold is the arithmetic and not the information. A customer who cannot see what he is buying will invent a cheaper version of it, or find the difference later on the invoice. Second, some customers must have a breakdown and are not being difficult about it. When you must divide, divide into two or three finished things, each worth having on its own, so that what can be declined is a whole part of the result, not the cheap half of every line.

Three questions, before you send the next one:

1. What could be lifted out of the last estimate you sent? Read it as a buyer with a pencil reads it. Whatever you can strike out in ten seconds has been struck out already by somebody who then said his budget had changed.
2. Does your figure name hours, materials or a result? If the largest item is your own time, you are selling the one thing that grows cheaper the better you get at it.
3. What is your price to be compared with? If you do not supply one he will use his notion of a day's wages. Write it in yourself: what the work will earn him, or save him, or cost him if it is done badly.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of the two was paid what he asked?

The second, and not because his mahogany was finer. Both wrote the truth about the same shop. One wrote it as a sum to be checked and the other as a thing to be owned. A sum invites correction, a thing invites a decision, and a man with a pencil in his hand will take the first invitation if you are good enough to send him one.

The verse:

The same deal and mahogany, the same brass and the same glass,
The same six cold weeks of the winter to be filled.
One sent a list of parts, and the list was shortened,
One sent a shop entire, and the shop was billed.

Until next time. Go and take the last estimate you sent out, and write it again as one price with the finished thing described above it.

P.S. Watch yourself on the other side of it. The next time somebody sends you a priced list for work at your premises, notice how quickly your hand looks for a pencil, and how reasonable each deletion feels. You are not arguing with his prices. You are accepting his invitation.

Also in the archive: Six Shillings for a Locking Door, The Fourteen-Page Proposal and Rot Behind the Boards.