Twelve Miles Between Calls

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town a man took his bookings at his own door, and before every yes he gave there was a short silence he never noticed making. This one borrows your century, where the yes is given by a program at two in the morning while the man is asleep.

Two repairers of domestic appliances in one town, the same van and the same drawer of spares.
Both put the same booking page on their websites in the same March.
Both let a customer pick his own hour without a telephone call at all.
One of them spent an evening first, writing down the work he would never have agreed to.
Same program thereafter, and only one of them arrived when he had said.
Which of the two had told it the truth about his day?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two repairers of domestic appliances in the town I have never named, though this one has electricity in it and a ring road. Washing machines mostly, fridges, the occasional oven. Twenty years apiece, the same sort of van, the same drawer of pumps, belts and door seals. Both sick of the telephone, which rings while a man is lying on a kitchen floor with a torch in his teeth. So both put the same booking page on their websites in the March, where a customer sees the free hours and picks one.

The first switched it on as it came. Nine until five, one hour to a job, every empty hour offered, a booking taken up to the last minute before it begins. For three weeks it was a triumph, in the sense that it filled.

Then a Thursday. Nine o'clock at one end of the parish, ten twelve miles off at the other, eleven back again within half a mile of the nine. The ten was a machine that would not drain, which is not a fault but a description, and the pump housing had a child's sock in it, and the whole thing was built in under a worktop with the dishwasher waste strapped across the back. Two hours and ten minutes, not one. He reached the eleven at ten to one, by which time the householder had gone back to work and the key was with a neighbour who was out. At twenty past four the page took a booking for five, thirty minutes away, because five was empty and so it was offered. By May he was telephoning customers to move them, which is the thing he had bought the program to stop.

The second spent an evening before he switched his on, and invented nothing. He took the last two months of the old notebook and asked of each entry what he had agreed to there that he would never have agreed to at the door. The answers came out dull and particular. Half an hour between any two calls, for the van. Two hours, not one, for anything described as a noise or a leak or a failure to drain, those being symptoms rather than faults. Nothing after four beyond three miles of home. Nothing for tomorrow after six this evening, the spares being ordered at six. And three compulsory questions before an hour may be chosen at all: the make, what the machine is doing, and whether it is built in under a worktop.

Eleven lines, forty minutes, typed into the settings one at a time. His page then looked thinner, and on some days offered nothing. Two enquiries went elsewhere in the first fortnight because the earliest free hour was the Thursday after. He set that against twenty-two jobs begun in the hour he had promised, and judged it the cheapest forty minutes of his year.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A program keeps every rule you have written into it, and not one of the rules you have merely always kept. And the rules you keep best are the ones you have never once said out loud.

Consider taking a booking yourself. A woman asks for Thursday at ten. Something in you declines before you have thought, because ten is the far side of the parish and you have a nine in the village, and out of your mouth comes half past eleven instead. You did not consult a rule. You were simply not going to do anything so daft. Twenty years builds a few hundred of those refusals, and they are invisible for the very reason that makes them worth having, which is that they are quick.

Hand the yes to a machine and that half second does not go with it. The machine is not faulty and has not misunderstood you. It did exactly what it was permitted to do, at two in the morning, with great obedience. The twelve miles between two houses are a fact about the parish, and the parish is not in the program. A thing that is not in the program does not exist on a Thursday. Nor are the settings it arrived with neutral: an hour to a job and every empty hour for sale were drawn to suit every trade at once, which is to say none.

It is also why only work you have done by hand often enough to be bored by it is fit to hand to a machine. The rules of a job done a thousand times have gone quiet, and you can hear them again if you listen for them. Those of a job done twice were never there to hear.

Do not write them out of imagination, which produces grand rules and misses the ones that cost money. Write them out of the record: last month's diary, read day by day, with one question put to every entry, which is what happened here that I would not have allowed. Each late arrival holds a rule, each job that ran to double its hour holds a rule, and they come out dull, and about distance, duration or notice. Dull is what you want, being the only sort a machine can keep.

There is a half of the bargain nobody mentions, too. A rule in your head is a hope, and it bends at four on a Friday when a pleasant man says he is desperate. The same rule in the settings is a refusal he never sees and cannot wear down, the thing refusing him having no sympathy in it and never being tired.

Two cautions. Every rule costs you availability: eleven leave you a working week, thirty leave you a page offering one slot a fortnight hence, which is worse than the telephone you were escaping. Price each in the hours it removes. And remember that a standing rule made after one bad job is paid for by every honest customer who comes after it, so read the list again each quarter, and keep one way of putting a job in the diary by your own hand that the rules do not touch.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What went wrong in my diary last month? Four weeks, day by day. Mark every late arrival and every job that doubled. Each mark is a rule waiting to be written in one dull sentence.
2. What must I know before I can promise an hour? Whatever it is belongs on the form as a compulsory question, not in a telephone call you make afterwards.
3. Which of my rules has the machine never been told? Open the settings and read what is in them, not what you assume is in them. The gap is where your Thursdays go.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of the two had told it the truth about his day?

The second, and the telling took him forty minutes. Both bought the same program and both got precisely what they asked for. The first asked for a day made of one-hour jobs in a town with no distance in it and no sock in any pump, and got that day, repeatedly, all summer. The second asked for his own Thursday, with the miles and the minutes in it. Neither machine was obedient to the parish. Both were obedient to the man.

The verse:

A program holds the rules you set
and holds them through the night,
but any rule you never wrote
it breaks, and thinks it right.

Until next time. Go and open the settings of whatever books your work, and put half an hour between any two calls.

P.S. Those eleven lines are worth more than the Thursdays they save, being the first page of the instructions for anybody who ever works for you. A trade kept entirely in one man's head cannot be handed to a second van, cannot be left for a fortnight, and cannot be sold at the end, there being nothing to sell but the man. You sat down to tame a booking page, and what you were doing was writing the business down.

Also in the archive: Still Setting It Up at Christmas, The Screen As It Came and The Morning She Waited In.