The Week He Ran Out of Sorts

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town there were two jobbing printers, and the difference lay in neither the type nor the paper, but in which part of the office each believed was the trade.

Two jobbing printers in the town I have never named, the same cases of type, the same hand press, the same billheads and auction posters, the same two thousand impressions in a working day.
Both of them found more work than they could carry by the spring.
One put his money into a second pair of hands at the cases, and by Friday had four formes standing locked and waiting.
One put nothing at all into hands or type, and spent a fortnight watching the press instead.
By midsummer one was delivering half again as much work and paying nobody extra, and the other was a week behind and short of letters.
Same type, same press, same two thousand impressions. Which of them had bought more printing?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

A jobbing office is a sequence, though it never feels like one from the inside. The copy arrives from a corn merchant or an auctioneer, and a man stands at the cases and picks the letters out one at a time into a stick, reading backwards: a morning gone for a handbill. The type is locked into a forme and proved, then goes on the press, where the sheets are damped, pulled one at a time and hung to dry. Only when they are delivered is the type distributed back into the cases. Both men ran such an office, with one press and a boy.

Then the spring brought the auctions and the sheep fairs. The first man did the obvious thing. He took on a second compositor, and his type was set at twice the rate. By the second week formes stood locked on every flat surface in the office, finished work in every sense but the one that pays, as nearly finished work pays nothing. By the third week the cases were empty. Every letter he owned lay in a standing forme waiting for a press that pulled one sheet at a time, and when the auctioneer came in on the Thursday wanting a bill by Saturday there were not letters enough to set it. He was out of sorts, in the old sense of the phrase, and had bought it with his own money. He broke up an unprinted forme, lost the setting, and spent the summer a week behind with two wages instead of one.

The second man spent his fortnight differently. He put a slate on the wall by the press and chalked the quarter hours in which the bar was actually being pulled. The press, the only part of his office that turned work into money, was in use for four and a half hours of a ten hour day. It stood idle while proofs waited to be read, while ink was mixed and a chase hunted for, and while he walked the work round himself.

So he changed none of the printing and all of the waiting. Proofs were read in the evening, so that each morning began with a forme ready and a second behind it. Paper was damped the night before, and the boy did the delivering. By June the bar was being pulled seven hours and more, by the same arms, and the office put out half again as much as in March with nothing added to the wage bill. In the autumn he bought a second press, and not one new case of type.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Your trade produces at the rate of its slowest step, so effort added anywhere else does not turn into money, it turns into a pile. This is the plainest arithmetic in business and the most reliably ignored, because a shop does not look like a sequence. But every order must pass through every step, in order, and the whole can go no quicker than the narrowest. That step is not one of your costs. It is your output in disguise.

So improvement has a location. A fortnight spent at the narrow step raises what your trade earns. The same fortnight spent one step upstream raises only the stack in front of it, and a stack is a bill rather than an asset: it takes room, ties up money, gets knocked and spoiled, and in a printing office locks away the very letters you need tomorrow. Most trades have their own standing type: a van of half finished jobs, a book of quoted work you cannot start, six customers waiting on one conversation only you can have.

Why is it so hard to see. Partly because we improve where our pride lives: a printer thinks of himself as a compositor, so the press and the paperwork feel like nuisances attached to the trade rather than the trade itself, and money goes where the skill is admired instead of where the rate is set. Partly because the narrow step is quiet. It has work heaped in front of it and nothing waiting behind, and is found by a walk round your own week with a chalk mark and no opinions, much as a fault paid in instalments must be counted before it can be believed.

Before you make that step bigger, stop it standing still. An hour it spends waiting on a decision or a material is an hour of the trade's whole output thrown away, and costs nothing to get back.

Two cautions. The first is that your narrow step may not be in the workshop at all. If the press stands idle because there is no work for it, the narrow step is the front door, and rebuilding the press is a wasted fortnight. The second is that the narrow step moves: relieve the press and your hands at the cases become the limit, then the drying room, then your own evenings. This is a question asked every quarter rather than a job you finish.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. Where is the work waiting? Walk your week from enquiry to invoice and name the step with jobs heaped in front of it while the step behind it waits. That step, not your busiest, is the size of your trade.
2. Was anything I improved this year improved at that step? List what you have spent on bettering your trade since January, then mark which of it landed on the narrow step.
3. How many hours a week does that step stand idle, and on what? Count it for a fortnight rather than guessing. Every idle hour you give back is output you have paid for and are not taking.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same type, same press, same two thousand impressions. Which of them had bought more printing?

The second, and he bought it with a slate rather than money. The first bought more setting, which he did not need, and paid twice: in wages, and in the auction bill he could not set because his letters were locked in work the press had not reached. Setting was never the rate of his trade. The bar was, and he had paid good money to lengthen the queue in front of it.

The verse:

The cases may be emptied and the formes stand six abreast,
The stone be full by Friday and the stick go twice as quick,
But the week will send to market what the bar has pulled by Saturday,
And the rest is only metal that you cannot use again.

Until next time. Go and find the one step in your week with work waiting in front of it and nothing behind, then count the hours it stood idle.

P.S. There is a tidy test hidden in this. In a well arranged shop, every step but the narrowest ought to have idle time in it. If every part of your week looks busy, that is not efficiency. It means all but one of them are making a pile, and you are paying to store it.

Also in the archive: The Day He Stopped the Wheel, The Hour Nobody Claimed and The Shutter at Seven.