The Tuesday Nobody Paid For

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town there were two men who went about the farms with a threshing set, and the difference lay in neither the engine nor the rate, but in what each asked for before he wrote a day in his book.

Two threshing men in the town I have never named, the same portable engine and drum, the same gang of six, the same price a day.
Both filled their books in September with farms wanting the corn out by Christmas.
One wrote each farm down on the farmer's word, and said he would see him on the day.
One wrote nothing down until a pound had crossed the table, and took that pound off the bill at the finish.
They worked the same hours for the same money, and by Candlemas one had threshed eleven days more than the other.
Same engine, same gang, same parish. Where did the eleven days go?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

A threshing set is a dear thing to stand still: an engine fed with coal whether it turns or not, a drum, an elevator, and six men hired by the day. The work is all autumn and winter and goes one way, barn to barn, so a book for November is written in September. Every day in it has another day either side.

The first man was the easier to deal with and everyone said so. A farmer would catch him at the market and ask for the Tuesday after Martinmas, and he would say the Tuesday was his, and write it in the book, and that was the whole of it. No money was mentioned, there being no work done yet to charge for, and it seeming strange to ask a neighbour for a pound six weeks off.

What followed happened perhaps eleven times between September and Candlemas, and never once in a way that looked serious. A boy would come over on the Monday evening to say the master was sorry: the barn was not cleared, or his brother's set was passing at half the money on the Thursday, or he would wait and see what wheat did after the new year. On the Tuesday morning six men stood in a yard not expecting them, the fire unlit. The Wednesday farm could not be brought forward, its own carts and lifters being hired for the Wednesday. So the day went, and the wages and haulage with it.

The second man asked for a pound, at the market, with the book open, and said why in one sentence every time: the gang is hired for your day and cannot be hired out twice, so the pound holds the day and comes off your bill at the finish. A farmer with a true reason could shift his day once and the pound went with it. If he withdrew, the pound stayed, and both men had known that in September.

He lost almost no days, and he arrived to find barns cleared and carts standing at seven. Nobody in this story cheated anybody. The first man was no fool and his farmers were no rogues. They had been given a day that cost nothing to take and nothing to drop, and they treated it accordingly, as any of us would.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A booking nobody has paid for is not a sale, it is a free choice you have handed the customer while keeping the whole cost of it yourself. He may use the day or not, as suits him nearer the time, and either way he is no worse off. You wrote him that privilege and charged him nothing for it.

This is worse than it sounds, because a day will not keep. A sack of wheat unsold on Tuesday is a sack of wheat on Friday, a little dearer or cheaper. A Tuesday unsold on Tuesday has gone out of the world. If you sell days, or vans, or chairs, or hours of your own attention, you sell a thing that spoils overnight, and the loss is not the profit forgone, which is what everybody counts. It is that day's wages and standing costs, paid out with nothing coming back.

Set against that, consider the man who has paid you nothing. On the Monday evening he weighs your Tuesday against his brother's set, against doing nothing, against the weather, and your day is the one item on the list with no price against it. He is not being wicked. He is doing arithmetic, and you have left your side of it blank. A pound on the table does not make him honest, since he was honest already. It makes the decision real.

There is a second gain, nothing to do with the forfeit. Money down changes what the customer does before you come. He clears the barn, finds the carts, is in when he said he would be, and stops shopping, not because paying has made him virtuous but because he now has a reason to get ready and had none before.

Say why you are asking, in the same breath as the asking. A condition that carries its own reason is obeyed where a bare one is argued with, and this reason is the easiest in the world to state, being simply true. The gang is hired for your day and can be hired out to nobody else. Keep the sum small and let it come off the bill, so the honest customer, who is nearly all of them, pays not a farthing more than before and only pays a little of it sooner.

Two cautions. The first is to keep this a holding and not a fine. The moment the sum grows large enough to punish, you have stopped protecting the day and begun hoping for the forfeit, and the customer will smell it. Let a true reason move the day once, with the money following it, since a rule made in temper after one bad job is paid for by every decent customer after. The second is that the money binds you too. A pound taken for the Tuesday makes the Tuesday the farmer's property, including on the Monday night when a bigger farm sends word.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. How many days did I lose last year to work put off or dropped at short notice? They arrive in ones and are forgotten in ones. Set them on paper with what each cost, and the figure is usually worse than the worst job you argued about all year.
2. What do I ask for before a date goes into my book? If the answer is a name and a telephone number, you are not taking bookings but issuing permissions, free of charge.
3. Which of the things I sell cannot be sold twice if the customer does not come? Those need money down. Work with no fixed day in it, picked up whenever the bench is clear, may not.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same engine, same gang, same parish. Where did the eleven days go?

Into eleven barns that changed their minds on a Monday evening, at no cost to themselves, about a day they had never paid a penny to hold. The second man asked a pound for the same day and gave it back in the bill at the finish. He was neither the cheaper man nor the better threshing man. He had simply stopped giving his Tuesdays away in advance.

The verse:

A sack of wheat will keep until the market comes about,
A Tuesday will not keep an hour past Tuesday afternoon,
So take a little of it now before the book is written out,
For the day you never charged to hold is the day you lose at noon.

Until next time. Go and write one line at the foot of your next quotation naming what you ask to hold a date, why, and that it comes off the final bill.

P.S. The asking sorts your enquiries as well as your diary, and does it early. A customer who will not put a pound on a Tuesday in September was very often not going to be there in November, and it is better to learn it at the market with the book still open than in a yard at seven in the morning.

Also in the archive: The Bale He Could Not Buy, The Monday He Kept Empty and The Ladder in January.