The Trough Across the Yard

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, where two basket makers soaked their osiers in troughs of the same width, and both worked a bench at the dry end of a long yard.

Two basket makers in one town, the same osiers and the same soaking troughs.
Both fetched their withies wet, in bundles, all day.
Both counted the walk from the trough to the bench at forty steps.
One of them spent a Saturday in February and never walked it again.
Eleven years on, that one had made the better part of a thousand baskets more.
Which, and what had the other man been buying with his forty steps?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two basket makers, in a town I have never named. The same cutter sent both the same brown osiers off the same withy bed. Both soaked them in a trough beside the pump, and both worked at a bench under the window at the far end, where the light was. Forty steps between, and a willow rod needing to stay damp, so neither could carry a day's work across in one load.

The first basket maker walked it for eleven years, briskly, carrying the finished work back when a load was ready. He knew the yard was awkwardly set and said so to anybody who asked, in the tone a man uses for the weather. He meant to see about it when the work eased, which it did not.

The second put a chalk mark on the door frame every time he crossed, out of curiosity rather than any plan. Twenty-two crossings in the day. Eighty steps the pair, say a minute and a half with a wet bundle and a hand not free for the door. Half an hour. On the Saturday he worked that out to the better part of a month of working days in every year, a sum too large to go on calling the weather.

Then he did the thing worth telling you about. Everybody in that yard, himself included, had measured the problem by the trough, a sodden elm box four men and a cart could barely shift. Measured that way it could not be done. So he left the trough and moved the bench, which weighed less than he did, setting it at the wet end with eleven shillings of second window cut above it. Two neighbours said he had ruined a good bench position, and for a fortnight he agreed with them. Then it was simply his shop.

Be fair to the first man. Some crossings carried a second errand, and one that does two jobs costs less than I have charged him for. He had a stiff back and the walk eased it. And he was busy all eleven years, which is the whole difficulty: nobody has an idle Saturday lying about.

There is a second thing he bought, and it cost more than the time. He took an apprentice in the fourth year, who learned the trade well and learned the forty steps as part of the trade, the way you learn which plank in a floor gives. When that boy took a shop of his own he set his bench under the far window, that being where a bench goes.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A fault that costs you a minute, and does so twenty times a day, is not a small fault; it is a large one, paid in instalments too small to be worth stopping for. Our attention is built to catch size, not frequency. A customer who leaves owing you nine pounds will keep you awake. Half an hour wasted daily will not keep you awake once, and over a year it is the greater loss by a distance. Nothing announces itself as the expensive thing, because the expensive thing arrives in farthings.

Worse, repetition is what makes the cost invisible. The tenth time you walk the forty steps you notice them. The thousandth time you do not, any more than you notice your own hand. By then it has stopped being a fault and become the shape of the place, and a man cannot fix the shape of the place. He can only fix a fault. The eye that no longer sees the walk across its own yard is the eye that is meant to see a slack rod in a basket.

The remedy is not vigilance, which cannot be kept up, but arithmetic once a quarter. Count a thing, as the second man did, with a chalk mark and no opinions. Then look for the light part of the problem. We measure an obstacle by its heaviest piece and conclude it cannot be moved, when the heavy piece is usually not the piece that has to move. In your own week the trough is the bank, the landlord, the way the trade has always been done. The bench is the hour you start, the order you work in, where a thing is kept.

This century is thick with forty-step walks, and they hide better than mine did, since a man crossing a yard at least gets wet. The password typed out eleven times a day. The figure kept in two places and copied across each Monday. None of it marks any invoice, which is why no customer will ask you for the Saturday that would end it, and so it goes the way of all work nobody asks for, which is to say nowhere at all unless you claim the hour yourself.

Two cautions. The first is to count before you call the bricklayer. A fault costing four minutes a week does not deserve one, and some friction is quietly doing a second job, like the crossing that carried the finished work. Find out what a thing does before you take it out, in the manner of the landlord who watched his porter for a week. The second caution is the opposite failure, and the commoner one. Improving the workshop is pleasant, feels industrious, and can be made to last for ever. One Saturday, one fault, the biggest by the arithmetic, then back to the bench.

Three questions, and the first wants a count rather than a complaint:

1. What did you do more than ten times yesterday? Not the thing that annoyed you most, which will be rare and loud, but the thing you repeated. One ordinary day of chalk marks beats a month of reflection.
2. How long has it been like that? Anything you have meant to see about since before Easter is not waiting on your intention, which has had its turn and failed. It wants a date in the book.
3. Which part of this is the light part? List the pieces, the fixed and the movable. You will often find the fixed piece never needed to move at all.

The Answer to the Riddle

One of them spent a Saturday in February and never walked it again. Which, and what had the other man been buying with his forty steps?

The second basket maker, who left the heavy trough alone and moved the light bench. What the first man bought was a month of working days in every year, paid a minute and a half at a time, and an apprentice who believes that is where a bench goes. He never once decided to spend it, which is the nature of the stuff: never bought, only never refused.

The verse:

The debt that falls in one great sum
Will wake a man at three.
The one that falls a minute thick
He pays, and does not see.

Until next time. Go and put right one thing you have stepped over since the spring, choosing it by the count and not by the irritation.

P.S. You cannot see your own forty steps, for the reason given above. Other people see them on their first morning. The newest person about the place holds a complete list for about three weeks, before it dissolves and your way becomes the only way. Ask them early what seemed odd, then sit on your hands, because the first thing out of your mouth will be the explanation, and the explanation is what has kept it like that for eleven years.

Also in the archive: The Hour Nobody Claimed, The Fortnight in Pencil and The Shutter at Seven.