Seven Days of Seeing Your Work From the Other Side of the Counter

— Will this open the door once it's cut?

— It should. Try it in the lock first. If it sticks, I'll grind it again.

— No, it'll be fine. I'm late.

The young woman took three keys, still warm, pushed a banknote across, and turned her scooter around. I watched the back of her jacket until it disappeared around the corner of the alley. Nobody ever tries the key in front of me.

I am fifty-two, and I have sat at a key-cutting stall at the mouth of this alley for more than twenty years. What follows is not really about keys. It is about a question I ask myself in the gaps, when the machine has stopped screaming and no customer has come yet: what am I doing this for?

These seven days are not meant to convince you that your work matters. Everyone has a day when their work feels important, and that day rarely lasts until the next morning. Nor are they about pleasing customers, because whether a customer is pleased is the customer's business. The seven days do something much narrower: they have you step to the receiving side and look at what you just handed over.

The job is done, and I still don't know which door it opens

Ten past seven in the morning, the shutter only half up. Brass blanks stacked on the tray, the smell of machine oil and hot metal rising when the wheel touches the key. Cutting three keys for that young woman took about three minutes. Cut, file off the burr, blow away the dust, check against the original, hand over. Brass filings lodge in the grooves of my fingertips, and at night, even after soap, they are still there in small gold specks.

From the moment the keys leave my hand to the moment one of them meets the lock at her home, I know nothing. It may fit. Tomorrow morning she may be standing outside her own door, unable to turn it, holding her bag and thinking the man at the end of the alley does sloppy work.

So I cut keys. And? Twenty years of helping people open their own doors. Their doors. Not mine.

I used to think that blank feeling meant the work was too small. After sitting here long enough I stopped believing that. My work ends at my hands, while its meaning, if there is any, starts in the hands of whoever takes it. Between those two places there is a door I never stand behind. And still I keep scoring the meaning of my work from the stool behind the counter, from where you can see only a machine and a pile of blanks. Score it from there and you get a low mark every time, because there was never anything to score in that spot.

I won't claim there is meaning. I can only say the place where I sit cannot see it.

So the first three days of the exercise are only looking. On the first day, at closing time, I turned over an old receipt and wrote down everything that had left my hands: three keys, one new lock cylinder, one cabinet padlock. Two minutes, nouns only. On days when I caught myself adding "helped someone" beside an item, I crossed it out, because writing that was already grading. If you work in an office, or cook for a whole household, or mind a market stall, write the same way: a price quote, a pot of soup, two kilos of greens.

On the second day, pick one item from the list and remember who picked it up and where they were looking when they did. I remembered that the woman that morning looked at her wristwatch, not at the keys. That was all, and I wrote it down anyway.

On the third day, watch the face of the person receiving, right at the moment of receiving, for about three seconds, and say nothing extra. The first time I saw nothing. A face was just a face, taking a key the way it takes change. The day after, a man squeezed the key in his palm before he put it in his trouser pocket, and a woman glanced at the sample lock hanging on my board as if checking it was the same as hers. There were also afternoons with dozens of customers when none of them left anything to remember. That happens, and I still wrote "nothing."

On the second day I slipped, once. I tried to force myself to feel moved: I looked at a customer's face and told myself this man really needs me. It felt fake at once. He needed a key, and he was waiting for it to cool so it would not burn his fingers. I had done it because I thought being moved was the destination of the exercise, when all the exercise asked for was looking. So I wrote down which hand he took the key with, and kept only that. A specific detail lasts until morning. A feeling you fake does not.

On a day too busy for all of it, drop everything except the third day, once, with the first person of the day. About three seconds.

Some people write about the day they saw meaning in a small task. I have not had that day. I only have a few lines on a receipt.

Asking in a way that doesn't ask them to praise you

Twenty to four in the afternoon, an old man pushed his bicycle up to the stall, a tarnished brass key sticking out of his shirt pocket, its head worn smooth.

— Cut me two of these, exactly the same.

— That's a very old key. Where is the house, with a key this old?

— The old house. Sold it. I'm cutting these to keep.

I cut them. He paid, wiped both new keys on the hem of his shirt, and dropped them in with the old one. I did not ask more. To this day I don't know what those three keys open for him, because the door belongs to somebody else now. For a while I tried guessing, then quit, because guessing meant inventing a story to match my own ideas.

From the fourth day of the exercise you move from looking to asking, and the mistake is in the question itself. That day I walked over to the noodle seller two stalls down, who has known me for fifteen years, and said, "Do you think my work, cutting keys, is worth anything?" She laughed, "Worth something, sure, everybody needs keys," and turned to ladle noodles for a customer. I stood there feeling short-changed. I had made her hand me a compliment, and she did, because she is kind. The compliment had nothing in it.

A big question like "does this work mean anything" cannot be answered by anyone, including the person asking. A question like "did that key go in smoothly the other day" can be answered in a second. And I noticed something odd: seven small answers like that add up to the very thing I had always believed only one big answer could give. I cannot explain why. I only know that my receipt got thicker, and I sat reading it, surprised that nobody had said the word "meaning" even once.

So on the fourth day, choose one person who received something and ask about the object, not about yourself: did the key turn smoothly, was the soup salty enough, was the quote readable. At first you usually get a single "yes, fine." Some days you get a whole story you did not expect, like the seamstress who told me the key to her medicine cabinet had been lost since her child was small, and she was only now having a new one cut. On the fifth day I rested. I worked as usual and wrote nothing, because every exercise needs a day when it is not done.

On the sixth day, tell someone outside your trade one sentence that a receiver said. On the seventh, read the lines you have written and add a last one: whose hands my work is landing in, or that I still don't know. Both count as answers. My sheet had seven days, with five lines that held words, one line that said "nothing," and one that said "don't know." I cannot tell you what yours will look like.

If every day is rushed, keep only the fourth day and ask just one person. One sentence.

For another way into the same thing, someone has written about a day of noting when they felt useful, from the side of the person doing the work rather than the one receiving it. The two approaches fit together.

If you tried and it did not work

Hoa, who sells dried goods three stalls down, tried it for exactly one day and then walked over to tell me straight.

— Look, I key in numbers all day. The one who receives my work is a screen. Whose face am I supposed to watch?

She was right. Some work has no receiver standing in front of you, especially work done at the back of things. For jobs like that, change the question. Do not ask who picks up what you made. Ask who opens it right after you, and what they do with it in the next ten minutes. Hoa went and asked the accountant sitting two desks behind her, and came back to say he uses the exact column of numbers she tends to rush through. She said nothing more, but the next day she did that column more slowly.

There is one more case, and I have no sure words for it. Some people see the receiver clearly, see the door, see the hand that takes the thing, and the question "what for" stays exactly as it was, not moving at all. If that is you, then these seven days are not what you are missing, and I do not know what is. I am a locksmith, I know locks. If a feeling of emptiness or heaviness lasts for weeks, presses on your sleep, your eating, or things you used to manage, it is worth talking to someone with the training for it, such as a doctor or a psychologist. Not because you did the exercise wrong. Some things need a person who has studied them to sit and listen.

And if you finish and all you have lost is seven slips of paper, that is fine too. There are five familiar pieces of advice for someone asking "what for", and anyone who reads them will find a spot where each one does not quite fit. This exercise has such a spot too.

Seven in the evening, I pull the shutter down. My hands still smell of oil, brass dust still wedged in the grooves of my fingertips. The sample key lies on the counter, the freshly ground part brighter than the rest.

Tomorrow the young woman may come back. Or not.

This article was created with AI assistance.