Two Bars of Signal

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. The old town will not do for this one, having no signal in it and nothing that would want any, so I set you down in your own century at the side of a road.

Two tyre fitters in one town, the same vans and the same jacks.
Both charged the same to come out, and both answered the telephone themselves.
Both had a website made in the same year by the same sort of man.
One took three enquiries from the roadside for every one the other took.
Neither had spent a penny more on advertising, and neither had the better price.
Which was which, and what had he done in a lay-by on the ridge with a watch in his hand?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two tyre fitters, in a town I shall still not name, though there is not a horse in this one. Both worked out of a van, both carried the same jack and compressor, and both would come out to a lay-by on a wet Tuesday for the same money. Their customer, nearly always, was a stranger standing beside a flat tyre with a telephone in his hand, a lorry going by at his elbow, and no great stock of patience. He did not want a tyre fitter. He wanted to stop standing there.

The first man had a handsome website, and I use the word exactly. It was built for him on a desk computer in a warm room on the fastest connection in the county, and in that room it was a credit to him. A photograph of the van across the whole top of the page, taken at dusk with the lamps on. Under it a moving picture of a wheel being balanced, which began of its own accord. A map. Lettering fetched from a company abroad, three sorts of it. A bubble in the corner offering to talk. And across the foot a notice about the records the site kept, which had to be put away before anything beneath it could be touched.

What it was out on the ridge, where the signal drops to one bar and stays there, was a white screen. Nine seconds of white screen, then the van arriving in strips, then the notice sitting over the telephone number, which was in any case a picture of a number and could not be touched to ring. The search that put his name before that man had put five other names underneath it.

The second man did one thing differently, and it cost him a morning. In his second summer he drove to the worst corner of his own round, the lay-by below the ridge where he is called out oftener than anywhere, turned the wi-fi off on his telephone, and sat in the cab timing his own website by the second hand of his watch. Eleven seconds before anything appeared. Twenty-two before he could have rung himself. He had looked at that page perhaps four hundred times and had never once seen it.

Then he went home and took things off, which is the harder direction. Out went the moving picture, and the bubble, nobody having ever spoken into it, and the fetched lettering, the telephone having letters of its own. The photograph he kept, reduced until it weighed a tenth of what it had. The notice stayed, the law being the law, but below the number instead of over it. And at the very top, in plain words readable in the first second, he put what he did, the villages he covered, what he charged to come out, and his telephone number made so that touching it rang him. He timed it again the following week. A second and a half to the words, and the number ringing under his thumb before he had finished reading them.

He kept a tally, too. Eleven enquiries from strangers in the quarter before, thirty-one in the quarter after. He would not swear to the whole of that, there having been a cold snap in the second quarter, and cold weather is good for tyres. But he would swear to twenty of the thirty-one, those being people who said they had found him on a telephone at the roadside, which not one of the eleven had said.

Be fair to the first man. He had been sold nothing he did not need and cheated by nobody. He had simply never stood where his customer stands, and nothing in his week was ever going to take him there.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Nobody out there is judging your website. They are judging the wait, and the wait is the one part of it you have never once sat through yourself. You see your own page in the best room you own, on the best machine you own, sitting still, on a connection you pay monthly to keep fast. Your customer arrives on a four-year-old telephone held at arm's length, in weather, with one bar of signal and a reason to be annoyed. You have never met the thing he meets.

Consider what the wait costs you, because it is not time. A man beside a flat tyre is not reading, he is choosing among the names a search has stacked on his screen. The cost of abandoning yours is one movement of a thumb, and the next name is already there, not better than you in any respect he could name, merely sooner. You were not beaten on your trade or your price. You were passed over while loading, which is a different and much stupider way to lose a job.

Worse, the wait is not merely an obstacle in front of your evidence. It is evidence. He has not seen your work, spoken to you, or met a customer of yours. All he has is the evidence actually in front of him, and what is in front of him is a man who cannot get a page onto a screen in the time it takes to say a sentence, asking to be trusted to come out quickly in an emergency. He will not put that into words. He does not need to. He rings the second name.

The cause, nine times in ten, is weight, and the weight is decoration. Not one item on the first man's list tells a stranded man anything a line of plain text does not tell him faster. Each was put there to impress a visitor who had not yet arrived, and together they are the reason he never did. A thing added for the look of it becomes one more step between a willing customer and his beginning, and the willing customer does not step over it, he goes away.

I will not tell you that speed sells, because it does not. A page that appears instantly with nothing worth reading on it sells as little as a slow one. The wait decides only whether your words are read at all, which puts it first in order of operations rather than first in importance. Mend it and you have won the right to be judged on your offer, which is where you wanted to be judged.

Two cautions. Do not strip the page on principle. Take the heaviest thing off, time it again, and look at what you have before touching anything else, because one photograph properly reduced is usually most of the cure, and the man who flattens his site to bare text for a further half second has lost the picture that showed his work. And remember who waits. You and your regulars sit through a slow page without noticing, having already decided whose page it is, which is why your own experience of it is so comforting and so worthless. The wait costs you strangers only, and strangers were the growth you were after.

Three questions, and the first is the only one that can be answered with a watch:

1. How long before a stranger can ring you? Not how long the page takes to settle, but how long until the number is there and touching it starts the call. Time it out of the house, off the wi-fi, in the worst corner of your own ground.
2. What is the heaviest thing on the page, and what job does it do? It is almost always the picture across the top, chosen by somebody looking at a desk. Ask of it what you would ask of a servant, which is what it brings in.
3. Where did you last look at your own site? If the answer is the room it was built in, you have not seen it. You have seen the plan of it.

The Answer to the Riddle

One took three enquiries from the roadside for every one the other took. Which was which, and what had he done in a lay-by on the ridge with a watch in his hand?

The second fitter, who timed his own page as a stranger in the rain would meet it, found twenty-two seconds standing between him and the work, and spent a morning taking things off until there were two. The first worked no less hard that summer and lost the jobs anyway, to a page he thought handsome and had never once waited for.

The verse:

Your page looks very handsome
On the desk that it has cost.
Out there beside a flat tyre
It is nine seconds lost.

Until next time. Go and stand in the worst corner of your own round with the wi-fi turned off, and time by the second how long it is before a stranger could ring you.

P.S. There is a second wait, and hardly anybody times it. A man fills in your enquiry form, presses the button, and the page sits quiet showing him nothing. He cannot tell whether he has sent it or broken it, so he presses again, or leaves and rings somebody else, and you get that enquiry twice or not at all. Whatever your page does at that moment, make it say so in the same instant, in words a worried man can read.

Also in the archive: The Fortnight in Pencil, The 9:47pm Enquiry and The Single Errand.