Ready in one hour, probably

At a phone repair stall in Sohag, there is a laminated sign above the counter: screens replaced in one hour.

It is printed in a clean, confident typeface, and that is part of the problem. Some days the screen is ready in forty minutes. Some days the right part has to come from Assiut and the phone is ready on Thursday. The sign looks exactly as sure on both days.

Printed words borrow authority from the printing. A handwritten note admits that a person wrote it, on a particular day, with a particular level of confidence. Type does not. A guess in neat type reads like a fact, and an estimate reads like a promise. The customer who comes back after an hour and finds his phone still open on the bench does not remember that the sign was a hope. He remembers that he was told.

We could do better by letting our words look as sure as we are. Imagine the sign printed slightly blurred, like a photograph taken while moving. Clear enough to read, soft enough to say: this is our usual, not our word of honour. Or a delivery date shown as a stretch of days, with the edges deliberately faded.

It sounds odd. It is more honest than the small line underneath that says times may vary, which nobody reads, because the caveat is small and the promise is large.

The test is simple. If you are not willing to show how unsure you are, in the way the message looks, perhaps you are not sure enough to put it up at all.