Glass and an old window

A glazier replacing a cracked pane in an old flat in Heliopolis measures the frame at the top, the middle and the bottom, and gets three different numbers. The wood has moved over the decades. Nothing in it is quite square.

The glass is the easy part. It is cut along a straight edge, and it is either straight or it is not. Anyone can check it against a rule, and if it is wrong, he scores another sheet.

The hard part is where the straight pane meets the frame that has warped. That is the putty, pressed in by thumb and knife, thicker on one side than the other, smoothed and checked and smoothed again. There is no rule for it. It is where the time goes, and it is where a good glazier shows.

Most of what a business makes is panes. Prices, procedures, opening hours, the form on the website, what the person at the counter is told to say. They are straight. They are easy to measure and easy to correct.

The people they meet are the frame. Customers arrive with moods and families, with a budget that changed last week, with a bad experience somewhere else, with a question nobody wrote an answer for. None of them is square, and none of them leaves that at the door. Everywhere the straight thing touches a person there is a gap, and the gap is the real work.

It is tempting to keep perfecting the panes, because panes behave. But the window is judged where the glass meets the wood.