The Yard He Had Left

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. We sit in your own century for this one, since the old town had no programs in it, and this happens only to a man who has lent a machine his voice.

Two repairers of garden machinery in your own century, the same mowers, the same benches, the same program bought in April.
Both wrote nine automatic messages into it and left them to their work.
In the two years after, both moved yard, raised a price and dropped a trade.
One never read those nine messages again.
One read every one of them through, four times a year, as a stranger would.
Same program, same April, same two years. Why was only one still found on the right street?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

The trade is mowers, strimmers and the small engines that drive them, work that rushes in from March and is kept alive by winter servicing. Both men bought the same program in the same April, and it was a good one. It took enquiries from the website, held the diary, confirmed bookings, reminded customers the night before a collection, sent a note each February about the winter service, and answered out of hours. Nine pieces of writing, counting the page of prices and the list of machines.

The first repairer wrote those nine carefully, and his were the better written. He spent the best part of a day on them, set them going, and then did what the program was sold to him for. He forgot about them, which was not idleness but the whole promise of the thing. Over the two years that followed he left the yard behind the old garage for a unit on the estate two miles out. He put the winter service up from forty-nine pounds to sixty-eight. He gave up two-stroke work. Three sound decisions, in no automatic message.

So the machine went on being precise about a business that had ceased to exist. Confirmations sent customers to the yard behind the garage, and on a wet Thursday in March a man stood at a padlocked gate with a mower in the back of his car. The February note still offered the winter service at forty-nine pounds, and a woman rang to ask why her bill said sixty-eight. The form still listed strimmers, so he spent the spring refusing work he had invited.

Those were the complaints, and complaints are the small end of it. The large end made no sound. The page still promised free collection within ten miles, written when the old yard sat in the middle of town. From the new unit it reached half the houses it used to. A man eleven miles out read it, counted himself outside, and rang somebody else. Nobody writes to a tradesman to say his automatic message has gone out of date. They read it, believe it and act on it, and the acting is invisible. He had a year with a hole in it, shaped like a sentence written two years before at a kitchen table.

The second repairer did one dull thing. He made a plain sheet with a line for every automatic item he could find, eleven once he counted the thank-you note and the words on his job tickets, and beside each the date he last read it. Four times a year he read every item through as though a stranger had sent it, asking one question of each: knowing what I now know, would I set this up today, in these words. Four stated a fact that had changed. Three he would not set up at all, among them a reminder sent at seven to men on site by half past six. He mended four, switched three off, and set the next date before closing the sheet.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A machine repeats a fact in the same confident voice long after the fact has stopped being true, and since it cannot know when that happened, every automatic thing you set running must carry a date on which you go back and read it as a stranger. Each line you put into one of these programs is a photograph of the day you wrote it. The business walks on. The photograph does not.

Understand what was sold to you. Automation is offered as a saving on thinking, when it is only a saving on doing. The deciding is deferred, not saved, and returns in a lump with two years of wrong addresses on top.

It goes unseen so long because your own memory is no use here. You do not remember the wording. You remember the intention. Ask any tradesman what his confirmation message says and he will tell you, with confidence, what he meant it to say, which is a different document. He approved it once and filed the approval rather than the text. So it must be read and not recalled.

Note which way the failure points. A thing that has stopped gives no sign, as I have argued about the automatic message nobody missed. This is worse, because the thing has not stopped. It works perfectly, with your name at the bottom, for people with no cause to doubt it. A broken machine embarrasses you. A faithful machine quietly makes you a liar. Both are mended by noting what you altered and when, which is why a dated line in a plain file earns its keep.

Two cautions. The first is that this is a review of facts and not of prose. Half an hour, four times a year, hunting the price that moved, the address that moved, the promise of speed you can no longer keep. A man who sits down to improve his wording will spend a Sunday on tone and leave the old street name standing in all eleven. The second is that switching a thing off has a cost of its own. Customers who were nudged stop being nudged, and no program will tell you February fell because you silenced the note. Write down what you stopped and when, and judge it a season later.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. How many things speak in my name each week without me present? Write the number from memory, then count the real one. The gap is this letter.
2. Which of them states a price, an address, an hour, or a service I offer? Those are the lines with an expiry date. Read them before the ones that say good morning.
3. Knowing what I now know, would I set this up today, in these words? If not, mend it or stop it this week, and put the next reading date in the diary before you shut the file.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same program, same April, same two years. Why was only one still found on the right street?

Because one read his own messages and the other only remembered them. The first left nine faithful messages describing the business he used to have, and they went on describing it, politely and accurately, to everybody who came near him. The second spent two hours a year reading his own words as a stranger would, so his machine said what was true. One kept a list with dates on it. The other had a good memory, which is precisely what fails here.

The verse:

The one wrote nine fine messages and left them to their work,
And every season carried off a little of their truth,
The other read his own words as a stranger holds a sheet,
And struck the old yard out of them before the spring came round.

Until next time. Go and count the things that speak in your name without you, and read the first as a stranger would.

P.S. There is a second shelf of these, not in your program at all. It is what other people's machines say about you: the old directory entry, the map that still has you behind the garage. Search your trade and your town once a year as a customer would, and spend the hour mending what you find.

Also in the archive: Eleven Small Wages, The Fortnight in Pencil and The Screen As It Came.