The Second Boiling

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town most of what was bought was bought to replace something, and a replacement is rarely designed. It is copied, and a copy carries the date of the thing it was taken from.

Two coppersmiths in the old town, the same sheet copper and the same hand at the rivets.
Both were asked by the same laundress for a washing copper, both could have had it ready by the Friday week.
One measured the old copper and priced its twin, and would have made honest work of it.
One asked how many houses she had washed for on the Monday the old one was new.
Same trade, same metal, same charge within a few shillings.
By the following spring, which of them was the coppersmith every laundress in the town sent for?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

The laundress went down the lane on a Tuesday with the measurements on a slip of paper, taken that morning with a stick and a pencil mark. Her copper had gone thin at the bottom and wept into the fire, and she wanted another the same, the brickwork being built round the old one and she could not be doing with bricklayers.

The first coppersmith read the slip and said two pounds fifteen, raised and riveted and tinned inside, ready by the Friday week, and he would see it set himself. A fair figure from a fair man. She said she would call at the other shop before deciding, which is what people do.

The second coppersmith read the slip too, then asked one question: how many households had she been washing for when that copper was new. She had to think. Four, she said at last, her own and three others, and a bit of mangling on a Thursday.

And now? Eleven, and a gentleman's shirts besides.

He asked what a Monday looked like. She told him, because people enjoy telling you about their Mondays. She lit the fire at five, boiled the whites, lifted them out with the stick, emptied the copper with a can, filled it again from the yard pump, brought it back to the boil and did the coloureds and the sheets. In winter she pegged out in the dark and was back in the yard before six on the Tuesday with the overflow. A busy time of life, she called it, and she laughed.

That second boiling was not a busy time of life. It was a measurement. For near two years she had been paying for a copper four households too small, in coal, in water carried across a wet yard, and in five or six hours of a Monday, which are worth more to a laundress than anything she owns. The copper had not failed her. It had gone on being the right size for a year that was over.

He gave her two figures on the one slip. Her twin at two pounds fifteen, the same as the other shop, or half as much again at three pounds six, with a bricklayer wanted for half a day to widen the setting, which was the part she dreaded and the smaller part of the sum. One boiling. Monday finished by two. Room, by the spring, for the two houses she had turned away in March.

Here is the hard part. The first coppersmith did nothing wrong. He was prompt, he was fair, and he priced precisely what he was asked to price. He lost three pounds six of work without ever knowing there had been a contest, and was on the wrong side of the telling of it afterwards, up a lane where every woman has a Monday and most are boiling twice.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A customer orders the size of his own past, and he will never once mention that he has outgrown it. He is not concealing it from you. He has concealed it from himself, which is a far more thorough job.

Understand what a person is doing when he brings you a specification. He is not designing, which is frightening and not his trade. He is copying the only model he has, the thing standing in his own yard, which is a faithful record of his circumstances on the day he bought it. The slip in his hand is a photograph of a year gone by, and every measurement on it was correct once.

Growth is almost impossible to notice from the inside, because it never announces itself as growth. It arrives as a second boiling, a second journey, a Saturday morning not meant to be worked, and each is absorbed into the general feeling of being busy, which people are proud of and do not examine. Nobody wakes and thinks, I have increased by seven households. They think, it has been a hard autumn.

So the question is not what he expects to be doing in three years. Never ask that. It invites a guess, and a guess is worth nothing: as we saw in what a man will tell you about next winter, people report their past with fair accuracy and foretell their own future not at all. Ask about the past instead, where the facts live. How long have you had the old one. What were you doing then. The arithmetic that follows is his own, done in his head with his numbers, and a man who has persuaded himself needs no persuading from you.

You are also likely the only person who will ever ask. His household stopped seeing the second boiling a year ago, and the last tradesman simply took the order. This is selling the job rather than the item, carried a step further back: not what is this for, but what was it for when you last decided it.

Two cautions. The first is that the question is asked once, lightly, and the answer accepted. A man who asks it twice is no longer enquiring but working the customer, and everybody can feel the difference. The second is that the larger thing is not always the answer. Sometimes the trade has shrunk and the honest copper is a smaller one, and sometimes the extra is one month of the year, better hired than bought in iron that stands idle for eleven. If you only ever find reasons to sell more, you have not been asking a question but performing one, and a customer who catches you at it will never ask you anything again.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. How old is the thing I am asked to copy? Put it on your enquiry sheet beside the measurements, with a line on what the customer's trade was doing then. If the two years do not match, you have something to say that nobody else quoting will say.
2. What is this customer doing twice? Second trips, second loads, second boilings, work spilling into a day not meant to hold it. Ask what a busy week looks like hour by hour and listen for the repetitions, which are measurements in the dress of a busy spell.
3. Which of my old customers has quietly outgrown what I sold them? Go back three and four years in your order book. You know roughly whose trade has grown since, and you alone hold the original figures. Those are the letters worth writing this week.

The Answer to the Riddle

By the following spring, which of them was the coppersmith every laundress in the town sent for?

The second, and not because he was the better coppersmith, for he was not. He understood that a replacement order is a message from the past, delivered in good faith by somebody who has forgotten when it was written. The first man answered the slip of paper. The second answered the Monday. Both would have made an honest copper, only one the right one.

The verse:

He copied the copper, the rivets, the rim,
and charged her a fair figure too,
but the size he was handed was four winters old,
and nobody asked what was new.

Until next time. Go and ask the next person who hands you a measurement how long ago the original was bought, and what he was doing then.

P.S. The same blindness operates on you, and rather harder, since nobody is quoting you for your own yard. The bench you work at, the hours you keep, the round you drive, the help you take on in August: each was the right size on the day you settled it, and not one has sent word that the day has passed. Pick the arrangement you have changed least and find out how old it is. You are very likely running a business built for four households on a Monday that now holds eleven.

Also in the archive: How Are the Hens Laying?, Twice Up the Same Ladder and The Gap the Cattle Used.