Three Days of Cutting

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town a man asked how long a thing would take answered out of his memory of doing it. His memory, being a faithful servant, gave him an exact account of his hands and no account whatever of his calendar.

Two stonemasons in one town, the same quarry and the same chisels.
Both took an order for a lettered headstone in the February, and both were asked when it would stand.
One counted the cutting, which is three clear days at the banker, and said a fortnight.
The other counted four stones he had lettered the year before, and said the first week of April.
Same stone, same hands, same three days of work, and only one of them kept his word.
Which of the two had measured the job?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two masons in the town I have never named, both letterers of the better sort. The stone goes up on the banker, the words are drawn out in pencil to a ruled line, and every letter is cut with mallet and chisel held at an angle nobody learns in a morning, the V of it catching the light so the words read from eight feet off on a grey day. A good man letters a plain headstone in three days, and both were good.

The order came in the February from a household behind the churchyard, and both men, in their separate weeks, were asked the same question. When will it stand. The first did what any honest tradesman does, which is to think about the work. Three days at the banker, four with the setting, call it a fortnight to be safe. He said a fortnight and meant it.

Here is what the fortnight actually contained. The wording was not settled, the eldest of the family being in another county, and his reply took eleven days and altered two lines. The quarry sent by a carrier who came up the valley on Thursdays, and the first slab had a vein in it that would have opened in the first winter, so it went back and another came the Thursday after. The incumbent had to give leave for a stone of that height and was away. Then the frost came hard in the third week of March, and no man of sense beds a stone in frozen ground.

He cut for three days, as he had said he would, and the stone stood on the fourth of April. He had not been idle an hour of those seven weeks. He had also told the family three dates and missed all three, and what they remember of him is not the lettering, which was beautiful.

The second mason kept a day book like everybody else. The only odd thing about his was a narrow column at the edge of the page holding two dates for every job. The day the order was agreed. The day the work was finished. No note of hours, no account of what went wrong.

He had four lettered stones in that column from the year before, and the days between the two dates ran thirty-three, forty-one, thirty-eight and fifty-two. He had cut every one of them in three days, and one in three and a half.

So when he was asked when it would stand he did not consult his opinion. He read four lines of his own writing, took the long end of them, and said the first week of April. Then he did a second thing the column had made obvious. The longest stretch in all four jobs was the same stretch, the waiting on the wording, so he no longer left a house without the words on a half sheet, signed at the foot by whoever had the right to sign, and he ordered his stone in the week of the order, the size being fixed long before the words were.

The stone stood on the thirty-first of March, four days early against a date named seven weeks before, and the family spoke of him afterwards as a man you could arrange a thing with. His cutting was identical to the other man's.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

You estimate a job out of your memory of working at it, and you have no memory whatever of the days you spent waiting. The three days at the banker are stored in you along with the dust and the ache in the forearm. The eleven days spent waiting on a letter left nothing behind at all, nothing having happened in them that belonged to your trade. They were ordinary days, filled with other work, and they went where ordinary days go. So your answer is not dishonest. It answers a different question. He asks how long before it is done and you tell him how long it takes to do, two figures that differ in most trades by a factor nobody has sat down and worked out.

A second fault lies over the first. The job that comes to mind is the one that ran clean, that being the version you have told most often, while the fortnight with the cracked slab is filed as ill luck rather than as a job. Ill luck is never admitted into the arithmetic, so your figure is the best quarter of your own history, trimmed again for the sake of sounding willing.

No amount of resolve corrects this, and neither does padding. A week added to a guess gives you a guess with a coat on, the week being a proportion of a figure already wrong. What corrects it is a count, which is why I have argued before that your own account of your own week is honest and wrong until something outside your head keeps the tally. Two dates in a narrow column is the whole of the method. Agreed, and done. Four jobs of a kind and you are reading a record rather than giving an opinion, and the record is the only part of you that was present on the waiting days.

You will say that every job is different, and in its particulars it is. But look again at the four stones. The cutting varied by half a day and the job by nineteen. Nearly all of what makes work long sits outside the work, in waiting on people, weather, materials and leave to proceed, and that part is not various at all. It repeats with a regularity that is almost comic once written down.

Which brings the greater profit, the one the second mason stumbled into. The column does not only tell you what to promise, it tells you where your weeks are kept. A man who shortens his cutting from three days to two gains a day and pays for it in labour. A man who gets the wording signed on the doorstep gains eleven and pays nothing, waiting being free to remove and expensive only to tolerate. The kept date is worth a great deal by itself, the distance between the day you finish and the day you said being the whole of what a customer calls reliability. But the waiting days are also where your next fortnight of work lies about unclaimed.

Two cautions. Keep your kinds of work in separate columns, since a headstone and a chimney piece averaged together give a figure describing neither, and you will be late on the short jobs and dear on the long. And do not quote the worst week you ever had. A date so distant you cannot fail it loses the order to a man who will cheerfully fail it. Name the honest figure, then say what would bring it forward, which is nearly always something in the customer's hands rather than yours.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. How many days did my last job take, counted on a calendar? Not hours at the bench. From the day it was agreed to the day it was finished. Both dates are in your book already and nobody has set them beside each other.
2. Which of those days was I waiting, and on whom? Mark them. Some belong to a supplier and some to the weather, and a surprising number to a question you could have asked a week earlier than you did.
3. What did I say at the beginning? Put your promise next to the count. The gap between the two is what you have been apologising for all year, and it has a number, and you can have the number by Friday.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of the two had measured the job?

The second, the first having measured nothing but himself. He knew his own labour to the half hour, a fine thing in a craftsman and no use at all in answering the question he was asked. A job is not the work in it. A job is everything standing between the word yes and the thing being done, and most of that is never in your hands. The first mason made his promise out of his skill. The second made his out of his records, and the records had been present on the waiting days, which he had not.

The verse:

The mallet knows the hours well,
the stone knows what it cost.
But only the calendar can tell
how many weeks were lost.

Until next time. Go and take your last three finished jobs, and count on a calendar the days between the yes and the done.

P.S. A further profit in the two dates arrives later. A man who knows a thing takes six weeks stops being afraid of six weeks. He can take the order in February without clearing his bench for it, seeing where the empty days inside it sit and laying another job across them. The fear that makes a tradesman promise a fortnight is mostly the fear of losing the work in front of him, and a kept record cures that better than courage ever has.

Also in the archive: The Sacks He Counted, Twenty-Two by Christmas and The Autumn They Both Got Right.