The crooked label

A woman in Muscat sells hand-stitched leather wallets, and none of her problems is big.

The label on some of them sits a few millimetres off centre. One corner of the box often arrives slightly crushed. The thread on the card slot is a shade lighter than the rest, because the supplier ran out of the right brown last spring. No customer has complained about any of it.

A big problem would be easy. If the leather cracked, she would change suppliers tomorrow. It is the small ones that are hard, because each of them, alone, is not worth the trouble.

And yet they add up. Leave enough of them and one day she is making a wallet she is not quite proud of, and has quietly decided that slightly off is what her work looks like. The standard did not drop on purpose. It was worn down, one small exception at a time.

Fixing them is a real choice. It means going back for the right thread, redoing a label that is only a little wrong, arguing with the courier about one corner. It is a decision to hold the line against the slow slide every small business lives with.

Leaving them is also a real choice. Her hours are limited, and an afternoon spent on a label is an afternoon not spent on a new design or a customer who needs an answer. Some people make better things by ignoring what they could polish.

What she cannot do is pretend she has not chosen. Either she fixes the small things, or she decides, honestly, that small things are something she can live with.