Twelve words on the back of a box

Somebody once spent most of a week on twelve words for the back of a washing powder box. How much, how hot, what never to mix it with. They cut a sentence, restored it, cut it again, and tried it on a cousin who had never read a label in her life.

Millions of people have since read those twelve words in about four seconds each, standing by a machine with a wet shirt in one hand.

That is a remarkable trade. One person's slow week becomes four quick seconds for everyone else, and it only works because the writer was not standing beside each reader explaining it aloud. They did it once, in advance, and the box carried it from there. When something is made once and read many times, the hours spent polishing it are repaid in the reader's favour.

Choosing works the same way. When people we trust sort through a hundred things and point to one, they hand us the hours they spent sorting. We get to skip the ninety-nine.

Live, person to person, there is no such trade. When someone talks you through something in real time, rambling and repeating, the cost is split between you, and usually more of it lands on the listener. A conversation has many pleasures. Saving time is rarely one of them.

What surprises me is how little we use the trade we have. The edited thing, the chosen thing, the twelve careful words, are sitting right there. And most evenings we pass them over for whatever is arriving at this moment, unsorted and unedited, simply because it is arriving.