Under the Wrong Heading

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town there were two steeplejacks, both sound men with a good head for height, and the difference between their careers was one afternoon spent reading something they had both paid for already.

Two steeplejacks in one county, the same ropes and lashed ladders, the same nerve on a cold morning.
Both named in the directory on every vestry shelf, at two shillings a year to the printer.
Both believing, quite reasonably, that a man who has paid to be listed is listed.
One walked to the printer's office that first winter and read his own three lines through.
One never read them, and stood there eleven years as a slater, in a lane the town did not have.
When a parish forty miles off wanted a man for its spire, why was only one of them sent for?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two steeplejacks, in a town I have never named. Both could lace a ladder up a church tower in a morning and dress new lead round a finial so that it turned the rain for thirty years. Both worked in the smell of hot pitch. Both had the habit of standing well back in the churchyard and looking up a long while before touching anything, the mark of a man who means to come down again. Neither was the better workman.

Work of that kind does not come off the street. It comes from a churchwarden with a worried face, a surveyor, a mill owner with a cracked chimney, none of whom knows a steeplejack to speak to. They look him up, and in that county they looked in the thick directory the printer brought out each spring, giving the district's trades under their headings. Both had paid to appear, years before, and thought no more of it.

In his first winter the first steeplejack had an idle afternoon and walked in to read his own entry. His trade was given as slater and tiler, his lane as a different lane half a mile off. There was no word in the three lines about steeples, towers, chimneys or height, because the slip had asked what he was and he had answered modestly. Under the heading a churchwarden would actually read, he did not appear at all. He corrected it on the spot, which cost nothing, since printers are glad of corrections. Then he walked the same errand round the almanac office, the inn where strangers in a hurry ask, and the ironmonger who is asked twenty times a year who to get for an awkward job. He went round the same four each spring thereafter, and twice more found an error that had crept in by copying.

The second steeplejack never read his entry. There was no reason to. So for eleven years the churchwardens and surveyors of the county, running a finger down the column for men who work at height, found one steeplejack where there were two. The few who came across his name found a slater at an address that returned their letters. He never heard a word of it, because nobody writes to a tradesman to say they could not find him. He concluded the country parishes were poor, and printed more handbills for his own town, the one place where everybody already knew him.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A good share of your trade is conducted through records you did not write, and you are the only person who will ever trouble to check them. The man looking for you will not, because he has no idea you are missing.

Such records go wrong by copying rather than by malice. An entry is made once, from a slip you filled in when your trade was younger and narrower. It is copied into next spring's edition, then into a list compiled out of that edition, then into a third thing nobody can trace. Each copy is faithful to the one before it and none to you, since in the meantime you have moved premises, changed what you chiefly do, given up a number, dropped the word you used to call yourself. The record answers in the language of a man you no longer are.

Then the shape of the loss, which is why this goes unfixed in good businesses. A wrong entry produces no complaint. It produces silence, and silence is the one result a tradesman never investigates. You will look hard at the customer who walks out of your shop and never once at the customer who could not find the door. I have written before about the customer who goes looking in words you have never used, and this is his cousin: he looked in the right list and was handed a confident wrong answer about you.

Which reverses the usual order of worry. Absence from a list is a small misfortune. Being in it incorrectly is worse, since a wrong entry does not merely fail to help, it sends the work elsewhere wearing the appearance of an answer. A man filed under a neighbouring trade is invisible to everybody searching for what he actually does.

The same test applies to records nobody printed. Every customer keeps an entry about you in his head, and if he learned you four years ago as the fellow who does gutters, that is what he tells his brother in law, who needs a roof. One plain sentence from you corrects a record nobody knew was stale, which is most of the work of becoming the answer to a question asked while you are not in the room.

Two cautions. First, this is no licence to pay for entries in everything that offers one. The test is whether a person with your problem actually consults the thing, since accuracy in a list nobody reads is tidiness rather than marketing. Second, do not mistake an afternoon of correcting for a month of trading. A right entry wins no work. It only makes you findable by somebody who already wants what you sell.

Three questions, and the first wants doing today:

1. If a stranger with your problem went looking this afternoon, what would he find? Go and be that stranger, in the two or three places he would use, not signed in as yourself. Write down what is wrong, old or missing.
2. Are you under the heading they use, or the heading you use? Write out the words a worried customer would use for the work you want more of, and check they appear in your entries.
3. Who writes your name without asking you? Suppliers, trade bodies, the firms that list approved people, the trade that passes you work. Send each a sentence giving your trade, your place and the work you want.

The Answer to the Riddle

When a parish forty miles off wanted a man for its spire, why was only one of them sent for?

Because only one appeared, under the heading a churchwarden reads, as a man who works on spires, at an address a letter could reach. That afternoon put him in the room whenever the question was asked, for eleven years, at the price of one walk a year. His rival was in the same book throughout, paid the same two shillings, and lived out his working life believing the county had no work in it.

The verse:

The ledger that another keeps will speak for you all year,
In words you set down once and then forgot.
Go read what it has made of you while there is light to see,
For silence never tells you what it cost.

Until next time. Go and look yourself up today, as a stranger would, and write down what is wrong.

P.S. Note where you corrected what, and check each place again rather than trusting the promise. Some lists amend an entry and some add the amendment beside the old one, leaving you in the same column twice with two trades and two addresses. One wrong answer about you is a lost enquiry. Two answers that disagree is a reason to choose somebody else.

Also in the archive: The Words She Typed, The Half Hour in October and The Small Brass Plate.