New this week: the machine, the software I built to run my small business, sends the invoices now, not just the reminders. I approved that on a Tuesday and forgot about it by Wednesday. That's how much I loved doing it by hand.
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?"
First I grinned at my phone like an idiot. A minute later the grin went: he wants a price. From me.
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 of course 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. 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. My shoulders went up just reading it - who talks to a client like that? -, until I realized that's exactly how he talks to me.
I sent the machine's version. Changed one word first, so some of it was mine. (Don't ask which word. It was not an important word.)
Anyway. The youngest brought home a flyer from his college, 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 five figures 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.
I checked my mail three times before bed, and once more from bed. The Mrs. took the phone out of my hand and put it face down on her side. I let her.
What we've got here is failure to communicate.
— Cool Hand Luke