The client abroad wanted the rest. He's the one whose late payers the machine already chases, and the deal was that if that worked, we'd talk. It worked. So last Tuesday I sat in their office with the machine and one agreement, written at nine in the morning: sort the incoming mail, label it, route it, nothing else. One page. We shook hands on the page.
By ten we were done, honestly. Then the client leaned in: while we're at it, could it also flag which mails are about unpaid invoices? Reasonable. On the page, if you squint.
And here's where it gets dangerous, because I love that moment. Somebody describes a thing, and before he's finished describing it, it exists. His eyebrows go up, my chest gets warm, and for a second I'm twenty-five again and the smartest guy in the building. By eleven he had asked four more while-we're-at-its and I had said yes four more times. Every yes paid out on the spot. By noon we had a dashboard, a report generator, and a category system with more categories than they have employees. A Rube Goldberg machine for cracking a nut. Each piece within scope, I checked. I'm the one who wrote the scope.
The client said it looked impressive. That should have been the alarm. It felt like applause.
The thing is, the yes is cheap now, but the price didn't disappear, it moved. Every clever extra is one more thing that has to keep working, one more thing the next idea has to fit around. You don't pay for the Rube Goldberg on the day you build it. You pay every day after. And I have never once been good at no.
It was the machine, mid-afternoon, that did the pushing back neither of us would do: none of this is on the page. Should it be?
I looked at the page. We had shaken hands on the page.
So we deleted. The dashboard, the report generator, the forty categories, four of the five while-we're-at-its. We kept the invoice flag, because it really was on the page if you read it kindly. What was left was one screen with thirty real mails and what happened to them, and that one screen did more for the client than everything we'd built to impress each other. He read it and nodded. In the end, that's all that matters, no?
By six it did exactly what the morning's page said, minus the detours. Seventeen of them, says the log. It counts them the way it counts everything.
One thing came home with me, though. To sort a company's mail, you have to read a company's mail. The machine now knows their inbox better than their org chart: who's really on holiday (the auto-replies give it away), and which work goes out a door that isn't on any chart. It mentioned these things flatly, the way it mentions everything. I changed the subject, with a machine. That's new.
They asked what else it can do. I said we'd start small. On the drive home I made a list anyway… and enjoyed every line of it.
You can't always get what you want.
— The Rolling Stones