Explaining to the people walking past

A picture framer in Doha keeps two samples on his counter. Same print, same moulding. One sits behind ordinary glazing. The other sits behind a coating that stops colours fading in a sunlit room, with a backing board that will not stain the paper over the years.

He explains the difference to almost everyone who walks in. Most nod politely and choose the cheaper one.

It is easy to read that as a failure of the customer. Some of them do not know what he knows: that a cheap backing slowly damages the very thing it was meant to protect. Others know perfectly well and do not mind. The print cost little, it will hang in a corridor, and in a few years they will have moved.

Both groups frustrate him in the same way, but they are not the same problem. The first can sometimes be taught. The second has already made a reasonable decision, just not the one he would make.

Teaching is worth doing. It is also slow, and it spends the same hour on every person whether they were ever going to change their mind or not.

There is another way to spend that hour. Somewhere in the city is the woman holding her grandfather's handwritten letter, the collector with a numbered print, the family with the only photograph of a house that no longer stands. They do not need convincing. They are already looking for someone who cares about what they care about.

He can keep explaining to the people walking past. Or he can make it easy for the people already on their way to find him.

Most of the frustration comes from trying to bring everyone along, when the work was always for the handful who were going there anyway.