What the Machine Never Wrote Down

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. I set this one in your own century, the old town having no screens in it, and the whole difference between these two men was a plain sheet with a date at the head of each line.

Two stove fitters in your own century, the same vans and the same page on the internet.
Both watched their enquiries fall by half in the same May.
Both had the same counting program, and both read the same fall on the same screen.
One spent the summer guessing, then altered four things in one week of June.
The other knew by the Tuesday what had done it, and had the half back by the month end.
Same trade, same figures, same fall. How?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Both men fitted wood stoves and flues out of a van, and both were good at it. The same smell of new steel liner in the back, the same dust sheet over a carpet, the same ladder up to the chimney. Enquiries came through a page each had paid a young man to build, with a form at the foot, and both ran the same counting program, which told them how many strangers came and how many wrote in.

The first man spent a busy spring improving things. A better photograph at the top, the old one being dark. The long page shortened. His prices lifted a little, untouched in two years. Three boxes added to the form, asking the measurements of the fireplace opening, so that he might quote without driving out. A paid listing in a directory. Every one a sensible act, done of an evening in four minutes between tea and the television, and written down nowhere at all.

Then May. The enquiries came at half the rate and stayed there. He opened the counting program, which gave him the fall to the nearest person and day and told him nothing else. He thought it was the warm weather, then the bank holidays, then the prices. In the second week of June, being frightened, he changed four things at once. July picked up a little. He cannot tell you which of the four did it, so he kept all four, and two of them cost him money as I write.

The second man kept a book. A plain file on the same screen, the date and the thing done, nothing besides. Second of May, three boxes added to the enquiry form, fireplace measurements. Ninth of March, photograph changed. One line, eight seconds, and back to his evening. So when the fall came he did not guess. He read down the page and saw the fall began in the very week he put those boxes on the form. He took them off on the Tuesday, and inside a fortnight the figure stood where it had in April. He had learned besides that a householder will not kneel in her own hearth with a tape to get a price.

Be fair to the first man. Every change he made was defensible, and his program is a good one. His was the quiet mistake of your century: he believed that because the machine kept a record, the record was being kept.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Your programs count everything that happens to you and record nothing that you do, so the second book is yours to keep: one dated line for every change you make, and nothing else in it. The figures are the weather. The book is the only account of your own hand in it, and it is wanted now as it never was before. In my century a change cost a week at the printer's and remembered itself. One that takes eight seconds leaves no mark on anything.

Consider what a figure can and cannot do. It can tell you that forty enquiries became twenty, on which days and from which towns, to an exactness my century could not buy at any price. It cannot tell you why, the causes not being inside the machine. That May held warm weather, two bank holidays, a rival shut for a fortnight, and five alterations by the trader himself. The machine holds the day of every visit and the day of no decision. Only you can supply the rest, and if you do not on the evening you act you never will.

Keep the book small or you will not keep it. Date, what you altered, where. No reasons and no hopes, for a record with opinions becomes a composition, and compositions stop being written by February. Set down what was done to you as well as what you did, the rival who shut and the wet weeks, or you will take credit for the weather.

What this buys is not certainty. It is a short list of dated suspects in place of a summer of guessing, and two more. When a number improves you can say what to keep, a thing most traders never reach. And you stop hoarding changes that quietly cost you, as the first man does, owning four improvements and no notion which was the improvement. See also why one change at a time is all any trade can carry and what an extra box on a form takes from you.

Two cautions. A dated line beside a falling figure is a suspect and not a verdict. Things coincide, and a bad May is sometimes only May, so take the change off and watch the figure again before believing anything. The other runs the opposite way. The book must not make you cautious, nor excuse leaving a plainly broken thing alone for the sake of a tidy trial. Write the line and get on.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What have I altered in the last three months, and on what day? Write down all you honestly remember of your page, your prices and your forms, then see how few carry a date. That blank is the whole of this letter.
2. Where is the line going to be written? Settle it today, and let it be somewhere already open when you work, since the record you must fetch is the record you will not write. A fine book in a drawer holds four lines by Christmas and none after.
3. Which figures am I going to act on? Keep the record against the two or three numbers you would change your conduct for and no others. A record kept beside numbers you only watch is a hobby.

The Answer to the Riddle

The same vans, the same page, the same program, the same fall by half in the same May, and yet one guessed until June while the other had it mended by the month end. How?

Because the first had a perfect record of what had happened to him and none at all of what he had done, and so had nothing to set one against the other. The second had a line written on the second of May, the day he added three boxes to his form, and when the figure fell he read the line, took the boxes off, and watched it come back. One man had the other half of the record.

The verse:

The machine will count your callers and will never count your acts,
And a figure with no cause beside it is the weather, nothing more.
So set the date against the change, the small one and the great,
And the fall that cost the first man May is mended in a week.

Until next time. Go and open a plain file, write today's date in it, and put beside that date the last change you made to your page, your prices or your form.

P.S. The book has a second use, arriving in about a year. A man who believes himself forever tinkering opens his record and finds nine lines in twelve months, four in one anxious week of January and nothing from March to October. A flat trade is no mystery after that, and cheaper than a consultant would have sold him.

Also in the archive: The Chandler's Two Jars, The Screen As It Came and The Chalk Behind the Door.