New this week: the machine sends the invoices, not just the reminders. The day the work is done, the bill goes out. I approved that on a Tuesday and forgot about it by Wednesday.
On Thursday the client abroad answered one of them, eleven minutes after it landed. The good one, the one who keeps finding me work I never asked for. He has also waited three months for an invoice of mine more than once, and knows it. This one reached him the day after the work. "Did you hire someone? If this is a service, I want it for us too. What does something like that cost?"
A man I trust, asking me to name a price, for a thing I built and believe in. It does not get easier than that. So I wrote the answer four times. The first draft had a number in it and a promise. Each version after that was a little more modest, a little more careful. By the fourth the number was gone and half the promise with it. I read them back in a row. Four drafts, and the only thing I'd improved was the distance between him and my price.
Then I asked the machine for a draft. Curiosity or cowardice, I haven't decided. Its version was three sentences long. The number sat in the first one, plain as a date. Nothing in it apologized, because nothing in it knows how.
I sent the machine's version. Changed one word first, so some of it was mine.
The youngest brought home a flyer from his college this week, a talk they are all supposed to attend: purpose after employment. He said it like a course code. I let it lie. At dinner the eldest showed me a site he built for his side job, and watched my face more than the screen. The youngest calls prizes nonsense, and can tell you who came second in anything he's ever entered. I recognize both moves. I invented both moves.
No answer yet from the client. None from the man who owes me either. The machine has said two things now that I couldn't, and both are out there, waiting. It doesn't wait the way I do. It doesn't check.
What we've got here is failure to communicate.
— Cool Hand Luke