Twelve Towns and Two Days

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. This one belongs to your century rather than mine, since the old town had no machine that would answer a householder's question at ten at night, and yours has little else.

Two restorers of old wooden floors in your own century, the same sander and the same lacquer.
Both charged much the same for a hall and two bedrooms, and both had a handsome page of photographs.
Both knew their twelve towns, their two days of dust, and the work they would not take at any price.
One of them was asked those three things forty times a year and answered every one of them with his mouth.
Same trade, same price, the same particulars known to both men.
What did the other one do with his, on a wet Sunday in January?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two restorers of wooden floors in your own century. Both worked alone out of a van with a drum sander, an edger and a vacuum the size of a water butt. Both took up carpet to find pine boards nobody had seen since the house was built, and both brought them back: the dust that gets into the loft hatch, the smell of lacquer that follows you home, the business of leaving a family one room they can stand in. Both asked much the same for a hall and two bedrooms.

The first had the better page. A man had built it for him three years before, with large photographs taken in good light, a line about craftsmanship, and a form for your name and your message. Everything a stranger actually wanted to know, he kept in his head and gave out with his mouth, forty or fifty times a year, pleasantly, on the telephone. How far he came. How long a house was out of use. What it ran to a square metre. What he would not touch. He had answered those questions so often that he no longer heard himself doing it.

The second had a plainer page and a wet Sunday in January with no work in it. He sat down with the telephone log and wrote out every question he had been asked since the summer, which reduced, when he put the near duplicates together, to nineteen. Then he wrote the answers as he would have said them, in short sentences, and put them on his own page under the questions themselves. The twelve towns, named one by one, because no householder has ever thought of herself as living within a thirty mile radius. Two days for a hall and two bedrooms, three if the boards are cupped. A range from this to that a square metre, and what moves a job to the top of it. No laminate. Dust extraction, but not a dust free job, since there is no such thing and he would rather say so. Eight to ten weeks' wait in the autumn, four in the spring.

It took him most of the day and he thought it a dull way to spend one.

Through that year the second man noticed his enquiries changing before he noticed them multiplying. People arrived already knowing. A woman said she had asked the assistant on her telephone who did pine boards near her village, and it had named two firms and said one of them came out that far and took about two days. She rang him because he was the one it could say anything about. Few of them asked what it cost a square metre, because they already knew, and the ones for whom the answer was wrong had quietly not rung at all, which was a saving of a different kind.

The first man's year was not a disaster. It was thinner, and oddly worse tempered. Half the enquiries he did get were for laminate, or for villages forty miles off. He spent the same forty evenings saying the same nineteen things, and by the November he had begun to resent the telephone, which is a poor way to feel about the instrument that feeds you.

Be fair to him. His photographs were better than the other man's, and so was his finish. He was not idle and he was not hiding anything. His particulars existed. They lived in his head and in his voice, where they had been perfectly sufficient for twenty years, because for twenty years every stranger who wanted them had to come to him and ask.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A machine can only recommend you on the particulars it can read, and nothing you have merely said aloud has ever been written down. Your trade is now described to strangers by something that has never met you and cannot telephone you, out of whatever it finds in writing. If what it finds is a photograph and the word craftsmanship, it will say nothing about you at all, because there is nothing there a careful thing could repeat.

Three reasons this works, and not one of them is a trick of the machines.

The first is that a machine recommending a tradesman behaves exactly like a neighbour over a fence, and under the same restraint. A neighbour will say he thinks you do floors and he thinks you come out this way. He will not invent your price. Anything he passes on is something he can state without being caught wrong, which means a fact with an edge on it: a town, a number of days, a figure, a thing you refuse. Adjectives have no edge. Quality, reliable, passionate about our work: these pass straight through a neighbour and straight through a machine, because there is nothing in them to carry.

The second is where your particulars are kept. A price written inside a photograph is not written anywhere. The same is true of the area you cover if it is only spoken in a video, of your terms if they sit in a document nobody opens, and above all of everything you keep in your head for the telephone. The question is not what you know but what exists in sentences outside you. This is the old trouble in new dress: other people have always kept records of your trade, and an enquiry lost to a wrong line in somebody else's book was lost just as finally when the book was a county directory and the error was a clerk's.

The third is that answering in writing does your selling for you, which the telephone never did at any scale. The man who publishes nineteen plain answers has taught a stranger how to judge the trade before she speaks to anybody, and she will judge the next man by his standards. That is the old business of handing a customer the questions to ask, now left where she can find it at eleven at night without troubling you.

You may answer that this is chasing a fashion, and that these machines will be different in two years. They will. It does not touch the argument, because you are not writing for the machine. You are writing down the answers to the questions you are asked anyway, in your own words, on something you own, where a householder can read them, a clerk could copy them, and a machine can repeat them without risk. That page was worth having when the only reader was a woman with a kettle on. Everything since has merely raised the rent on not having it.

Two cautions. The first: do not write it for the machine. The moment you start stuffing in phrases you imagine it likes, you are writing something a householder has to wade through, and she is the only one of your two readers who can pay you. Write it as you speak it, and the machine will manage, since it was built out of how people speak. The second: put down only what you will stand behind for a year, and put the month at the foot of it. A machine will repeat a figure of yours long after you have stopped charging it, and in a confident voice, so read the page through every quarter with the telephone log beside you.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What did the last twenty people ask me? Not what you think they ask. Go through the log, the messages and the enquiry form, and write the questions down in the words they used. Twenty will cover a whole trade, and they will not be the ones you would have guessed.
2. Where do my particulars actually live? Take your area, your price shape, how long the work takes and how soon you can come, and for each one say where it is written in plain sentences. If the honest answer is in a photograph, in a video, in my head, then for every stranger who has not telephoned you it does not exist.
3. What would a stranger get wrong about me? The work you do not take, the trade you are mistaken for, the village you are too far from. Write those down as well. Being left out of the wrong recommendation is worth as much to you as being put into the right one.

The Answer to the Riddle

What did the other one do with his particulars, on a wet Sunday in January?

He wrote them down. Nineteen questions he already knew by heart, with the answers in the words he would have used on the telephone, on a page belonging to him. He did not gain a single fact that day. He only moved what he knew out of his head, where it could be had by one person at a time and only by asking him, into writing, where it could be repeated by a machine to a woman in a village he had never worked in.

The first man still knows everything the second man published. He is simply the only one who knows it.

The verse:

The things you say a hundred times
are said, and then they go;
the things you write stay on the shelf
for strangers you don't know.

Until next time. Go and take the last ten enquiries you answered, write the question and your real answer beside each one, and put all ten on your own page before the week is out.

P.S. There is a second gain nobody expects. A man who writes out his nineteen answers in cold blood finds he does not care for the sound of two or three of them: the wait he has apologised for all year, the price range whose bottom end he resents every time he quotes it. Said aloud to one person, a weak answer can be hurried past. Set down in a sentence on your own page, it sits there looking at you until you either defend it or change the business behind it.

Also in the archive: The Yard He Had Left, Everything but the Name and Fourteen Curtain Poles.