The Second Column

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, where two men hung window blinds at the same price, and only one could tell you how many days he had sold.

Two blind makers in one town, the same holland cloth and the same eight shillings a blind.
Both worked from dark to dark and neither was ever idle.
Both kept a day book and wrote in it every day they worked.
One ruled his page into a single column. One ruled his into two.
At the year's end one had money put by and the other could not say where his had gone.
Which, and what stood in the second column?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two blind makers, in a town I have never named. Both bought holland cloth and spring rollers from the same warehouse on the same account, and both hung a plain blind for eight shillings.

The first was the quicker of the two with a tack hammer. He had worked out his price with a pencil on the back of a warehouse invoice, and it was honest arithmetic as far as it went. Cloth, two and threepence. Roller, cord and pulley, tenpence. An hour and a half of his own time, and a little over for wear on his tools. Eight shillings left him a fair return, and he never doubted the figure, because the figure was correct.

He was busy all that year. So busy that his wife took the day book off him in November and found he had worked two hundred and eighty-eight days and could not meet the warehouse account.

The second had ruled his day book into two columns the January before. The left was headed worked, the right paid for. He filled in both every evening, and in most weeks they did not agree.

They did not agree because of the Tuesday he spent walking out to a house on the Kirk road to measure five windows for a lady who then had her sister's man do them. Because of the afternoons on a step with a roll of cloth under his arm, waiting on a housemaid who had the key and had gone to the market. Because of the Mondays at the warehouse, the blind he cut four inches short and made again at his own cost, and the hour each Sunday with the book and the bills. And because of the fortnight after Michaelmas when the town stopped thinking about windows and he sat in the shed oiling rollers.

At the year's end his columns read two hundred and ninety-one, and one hundred and sixty-four.

So he did the sum nobody had taught him. He took what his year had cost him altogether, shed and warehouse account and handcart and wasted cloth, and a living for himself he would no longer pretend was free, and divided it not by the days he worked but by the hundred and sixty-four a customer had paid for. What came out was better than half again what he had been getting on a sold day. He put the plain blind to eleven shillings in the spring, lost a fifth of the enquiries, some of them loudly, and ended the next year with more money in the box and thirty fewer days on his feet.

Be fair to the first man, who was neither lazy nor a fool and was the better craftsman of the two. He priced from the only two figures anybody writes down, the invoice and the clock. Nobody sends a bill for the afternoon on the doorstep. It arrives all the same, at Christmas, as a question you cannot answer.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A price is not the cost of the job divided by the hours it takes, but the cost of your year divided by the days a customer will pay for. He pays only for the hours spent on his own windows. Every other hour of your year must ride somewhere on that bill, for there is nowhere else for it to go.

Consider what those other hours are. Quoting. Travelling. Waiting. Buying. Correcting your own mistakes. Keeping the books, chasing the slow payer, answering the enquiry that was never coming to anything. None of it is idleness and most of it cannot be abolished, because it is not waste. It is the cost of being available to be hired at all. A trade is a standing offer, and the standing costs.

Notice that the error hides inside a sum that is perfectly correct. The first man's eight shillings covered the blind. It did not cover the walk to the Kirk road, and could not, because the walk was not in front of him while he did the arithmetic. This is why a man is busy for eleven months and poor in December, and why he blames the price of cloth, which has moved threepence, and not his own divisor, which is out by nearly half.

So find your divisor before you argue with your price. Count last month honestly: how many days did somebody pay you for. Then take every pound the month cost you, a proper wage for yourself among them and not the leavings, and divide. What comes out is your floor for a sold day, and until you know it you are guessing at every quote. It also puts a figure on the attendance you hand out free with small work, the whole subject of the half mile you walk for twopence, and tells you what an hourly rate conceals from the one man it ought to inform.

Two cautions. First, the sum gives you a floor and not a price. What the work is worth to the man who wants it is a different question and usually a larger number; the floor only tells you which jobs to refuse. And a low count of sold days is sometimes an instruction to mend the week rather than raise the price, by charging for the measuring visit, or grouping a district into one afternoon. Second, keep the arithmetic in your own pocket. The customer did not come to hear about your empty fortnight, and a price explained by your troubles invites him to find a man with fewer.

Three questions, and the first wants doing before the week is out:

1. How many days last month did a customer actually pay you for? Not days worked, not days busy. Count them off a calendar. The number comes out lower than you expect, and the whole of your pricing rests on it.
2. What must one sold day earn, and is your present price above it? Divide the month's true costs, your own wage among them, by the number just counted. Any job priced under it is done at the expense of the others.
3. Which unsold hour is the largest, and will you price it or cut it? Both are respectable answers. Doing neither is how a busy year turns out to have been unpaid.

The Answer to the Riddle

At the year's end one had money put by and the other could not say where his had gone. Which, and what stood in the second column?

The man with two columns. The second was headed paid for, and fell short of the first by a hundred and twenty-seven days. He did not price his blind against the cloth and the hour. He priced it against the year, divided by the days the town would buy from him. The other reached a figure that was right about every blind and wrong about his life.

The verse:

The cloth and the hour are easy to reckon,
The waiting and walking are not.
Count up the days that were paid for, not worked,
And divide what the whole of it cost.

Until next time. Go and count the days last month a customer paid you for, and divide last month's costs by that number.

P.S. Mind the word busy. It measures the first column only, which is why it is poor comfort in a bad year and dangerous comfort in a good one. Rule the second column tonight. It costs a line in the day book and an honest minute each evening, and it is the cheapest set of accounts you will keep.

Also in the archive: The Price of an Hour, Five for the Money of Three and The Millwright's Two Pounds.