Where the Water Stood

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town there were two men who drained wet land, both willing to go and look at anything for nothing, and the whole difference between them was a handful of sticks pushed into a meadow by somebody else.

Two drainers in the town I have never named, the same clay tiles and the same trenching spade.
Both were sent for by farmers with a sour meadow and no notion of the cause.
Both answered every letter, and both would drive out to look for nothing.
One set off the morning the letter reached him, whatever the week had been.
One wrote back first, and asked for sticks in the ground and the date of the rain.
Same trade, same tiles, same enquiries. Whose winter was full of work?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Both men laid clay tile in the heavy land north of the river, with the same cart of pipes and the same narrow spade worn thin on one side. Their enquiries came in the same way, a letter in a farmer's hand or a word at the Michaelmas market: the bottom meadow is sour, the ewes will not lie on it, come and tell me what it wants.

The first drainer went. That was his pride and his trade. Eight miles out with the horse, an hour walking a field in the second week of a dry September, nothing to see but short grass and a thistle, while the farmer pointed at the whole of it and said it was wet, all of it, every winter. He sounded two or three places, guessed at the fall, named a figure and drove the eight miles home. The farmer would think about it after harvest. Over the year he made thirty-one such journeys and laid tile in nine fields, which he put down to a hard season.

The second drainer answered with three lines. Before I come, he wrote, do this for me. After the next heavy rain, walk the field and push a stick in where the water stands, and another where it gets away into the ditch, and write down the day it rained. Send me that and I will be with you on the Thursday following.

About half of them did it. The sticks told him in ten minutes what a dry day could not have told him in a week: not that the field was wet, which he knew, but that the water came off the slope above the hedge and stood where an old drain had fallen in and turned itself into a pond underground. He had the line of the work before his coat was off. More than that, the man beside him had altered. He had walked his own meadow in the rain with his boots filling, and had looked at the thing closely enough to have an opinion about it. He wanted telling what it cost to end the trouble, not whether he had one. That year he made fourteen journeys and laid tile in eleven fields.

Be fair to the first man. He was courteous, generous with his legs, and honestly of the view that a man who writes to you for help should not be set homework. Two of his nine would never have pushed a stick into a field for anybody, and one became his best customer. He paid for those two with twenty wasted days.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Ask every enquiry to do one small thing before you go out to it, and the ones who were never going to buy will have told you so this week instead of in six. The request does two jobs, which is why it is worth the awkwardness of making it. It fetches a fact you could not otherwise have, and it sorts the enquiries with a decision behind them from those with only a grumble.

Take the fact first. What decides the price of your work is very often not visible on the day you call. The water stands after rain and you are there in a dry fortnight. The noise happens when the machine is cold and you arrive at noon. The figure you need is on an old bill in a drawer. You cannot be present for any of it, so you guess, and your guess is the part of your estimate that gets argued about later. The errand is how you obtain a witness to a time you could not attend.

The sorting deserves arguing rather than asserting. The claim is not that a man who does you a small service is thereby bound to you. He is not, and there is no magic in it. A wish costs nothing and so tells you nothing, and every enquiry is a wish at the moment it arrives; the difficulty is that wishes and intentions are written in the same words. Ten minutes of plain work is the cheapest test of which one you hold, and a fair test, since the man takes it alone in his own field with nobody to perform for.

The objection is that every obstacle loses you enquiries, and some of those would have paid. True, and the first man's best customer is the proof of it. But the hurdles that cost you good work are the ones that serve the seller: the form with twenty boxes, the demand that a man explain himself before he may speak to you. Those are a toll. The errand is the opposite thing in a similar coat, and its justification is the sentence you say out loud. I ask this because it is the difference between a proper price and a guess, and you are the one who lives with the guess.

Then the arithmetic of your own legs. I have argued before that you ought to know how many enquiries it takes you to make a job, and the useful thing is to see that the number is not weather. The journey is the most expensive article you sell, being a day of your life, and the only one you hand over for nothing. Thirty-one days given away to get nine jobs is twenty-two days paid for the privilege of asking nothing.

As to the shape of it, three rules. Ask for one thing and never four, because every extra request divides the will and costs you the reply. Make it something a man can do without knowing your trade: a measurement, a photograph, a reading, a date, an old invoice, a stick in the ground, never an opinion about method. And put your own side of the bargain on the end, with a day in it. Send me that by Friday and I will be with you on Tuesday. A request with a promise attached is a transaction. A request alone is a hoop.

Two cautions. The first is that you must know an order when you hear one. A man who writes come on Tuesday and bring your tools has already decided, and to answer him with homework is to insult the one enquiry that needs nothing from you. The second is that a refusal is information and not an affront. Some are merely busy, some are buying elsewhere and wanted a figure to wave about. Put the name and the date in your book, send a civil line in the spring, and spend the saved day on the field with the sticks in it.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What one fact decides the price of my work, and do I have it before I set out? Not the pleasant facts. The one that moves the figure by a quarter either way.
2. What could an enquirer do in ten minutes that is plainly for his own benefit? If you cannot say out loud why it helps him, you have invented a toll and not an errand.
3. How many journeys did I make last month, and how many became work? That ratio is the price of asking nothing.

The Answer to the Riddle

The same tiles, the same spade, the same sour meadows and the same farmers writing the same letters. Whose winter was full of work?

The second, and not because he was cleverer in a field. He arrived knowing where the water came from, which a dry day would never have shown him, and beside a man who had seen his own trouble with his own boots wet. The sticks did both, for the price of three lines. His rival bought the same knowledge in days, got it later, and got it from a man who was still only curious.

The verse:

Your legs are stock you cannot buy, your days are all you sell,
So ask a little labour of the man who sends for you.
The meadow with his sticks in it will have your tiles by Lent,
And he who will not walk it once was never going to dig.

Until next time. Go and settle the one small thing you will ask for, and ask it of the next enquiry that arrives.

P.S. The device is worth as much after the work is agreed as before it. There is usually one thing a customer could do that would otherwise cost you half a morning: clear the cupboard, move the car, leave the key next door. Name it when you name the start date, with a day attached, and the job begins at eight instead of half past nine.

Also in the archive: The Buttons and the Book, The Nineteen Yards and Eight to Twelve Hundred.