Reputations are delicate, vulnerable things, chimeras of good will, the tenuous byproduct of doing good work. They are created out of the thin air, solely by the words and beliefs of others, and sustained by a sort of social momentum, so that people who are continents away might trust their lives to a completes stranger, simply because someone told someone who told someone who told them that said stranger could be counted on to do things well.

    Reputations are built on standards, and standards are meaningless unless they are agreed upon as significant and appropriate. I may measure to the nearest thousandth, or to the nearest eighth, or to the nearest furlong, but unless there is some consensus on tolerance standards, who knows which is best? Unfortunately, standards are kind of murky in the marine trades. Individuals may have high ones, but a random client won't know that; there is almost no such thing as licenses, certificates, or degrees. So we who work on boats tend to live and die by reputation, and reputation alone.

   This can be a good thing, if one's standards are high, and if the world is aware of that fact. But proclaiming one's standards to the world is the entire point of a certificate, and in the absence of that piece of paper, in the absence of those written words that seek to assure the reader that the holder of the certificate has been deemed by others (also-holders-of-certificates-and-therefore-competent) to have some level of mastery of a given discipline ‚ in the absence, in other words, of a formalized, notarized, formally-consensualized version of a reputation, one is left in a very fragile position; reputations are made by words, and they can be vaporized with words. No matter how good you are, if enough people think you're not, and say so, the world will tend to agree with them. Therefore, holders of reputations must spend appreciable amounts of time protecting those reputations, because there are also no certificates necessary to badmouth someone.

   It is amazing how little it takes to mess up someone else's life. Just a while ago, when my spouse Christian was preparing her dad's boat for sale, she was having a lot of trouble tracking down a significant leak. We're talking a couple-hundred gallons a day here. The hull had just been through a major overhaul, so she figured that the shipwrights must have missed a seam or something. She couldn't see where it was coming in from the inside, so she hired a couple of divers to track the leak down. They released fine sawdust and squirted milk underwater, beneath the hull. The idea is that even a fine leak will suck these things in, revealing its location. A great old trick, but this time it didn't work. Turns out that the leak was coming from a connection in the fresh water supply line; every time we opened the dock faucet, we dumped a lot of water in the bilge. A happy ending, except that shortly thereafter we had a customer all set to pay top dollar for the boat, until some dockside expert told him that the boat was being held up by sawdust in the seams. Neither we nor even the divers could convince the client otherwise. By the way, we did finally sell dear old "Lotus", for a much lower price.

   On more of a rigging reputation note, here's a doozy: there's a beautiful Alden schooner going together in California, and we got the job to make the gang. One of our favorite details on boats like this is to make the bobstay "dead", that is with no turnbuckle. The idea is that this stay never gets adjusted, and doesn't even require a turnbuckle to tighten the wire ‚ you just make it the right length, have a bunch of friends stand on the end of the bobstay, hook it up, and tighten both it and the jibstay (which also doesn't need a turnbuckle) with the backstay. With this arrangement, you not only save the cost of the biggest turnbuckle on the boat, you also reduce pitching moment by removing the heaviest turnbuckle on the boat. Plus it just plain looks lighter and cleaner up there.

   Our client was very happy at the prospect of this nifty bobstay. Until, that is, he described it to someone else who was working on the boat. Now this person had done some rigging, and his father-in-law had done a lot. He told our client that the arrangement was bad, that he'd never seen it on a sailplan, so naval architects though it was bad. I don't want to go into the reasons why he thought it was bad, as none of them made any sense, but the upshot was that the client sent us the bobstay back, and asked for a new, shorter one, with a turnbuckle. The difference in length is such that we can't just shorten the old one; we must build a complete new one. So, with the cost of the turnbuckle, the client is out an extra $400 or so.

   But wait, it gets worse. We also made up the bowsprit shrouds in advance, working from measurements that we'd agreed on with the shipwright. Unfortunately, the boat as built had something else in the places the shroud tangs were to go. No big deal; he just had the foundry make up some extra-long toggles, so the wires could reach the repositioned tangs.

   Cut to a couple of weeks later. It is evening and I'm leaving the shop, in a hurry because I'm late for a class. There are three people standing in the parking lot. None of them look familiar, but one of them says, "Are you Brion Toss?" I say yes,and hello, still moving towards the car. I figure they might have seen me at a boat show or on the docks or something. The same man says, "I hear you made up some rigging, and that it didn't fit." Now this is a very weird thing to say. I am taken aback, and still late, but I manage to ask what on earth he is talking about. And he refers to the California schooner, and its bowsprit shrouds and bobstay. I say something about not believing everything you hear, get in the car, and leave. It was not a moment of marvelous equanimity on my part.

   Now, having the rigging fit is good for my reputation. I have, in fact, made rigging the wrong length, and often enough that I don't need to be badmouthed when I make it the right length. How this guy got the story, and from whom, is a mystery; I haven't seen him since. I just get this terrible feeling that he's out there right now, telling someone that I haven't figured out how to use a tape measure. Nothing I can do about it.

    Glad I got that off my chest. Let's talk about someone else for a while. A few years ago, Schaeffer had a problem with some of its blocks: the pins connecting the shackles to the body of the blocks were breaking. These pins were made by a subcontractor, and as I understand it, the fellow running the company figured he could afford to buy a lot more cocaine if he didn't use such expensive materials. Quite a few substandard pins went into Schaeffer blocks, and eventually they began failing in spectacular fashion. What did Schaeffer do, aside from settling the odd lawsuit? They printed up a flyer, detailing the problem, and urging people to check their blocks. They distributed this to every place in the world where someone might conceivably have purchased one of their blocks. They followed up with calls and visits and reminders from their reps. In a manner of speaking, they voluntarily got up in the middle of a crowded marketplace, waved their arms wildly, and shouted, "WE MADE SOME BAD BLOCKS!"

   And guess what? It was good for their reputation. Anybody can proclaim the quality of their work; it takes an unusually solid company to proclaim their flaws. But in doing so they (a) show the world that they are so responsible, and put such extreme emphasis on integrity, that they are willing to bruise their bottom line, significantly, just in order to do right by their customers, and (b) they kept a lot of people from having some deeply unpleasant experiences. It's the kind of thing that builds customer loyalty. Simply by reporting these facts, I hope and trust that I am polishing Schaeffer's reputation.

   Contrast this with something that happened to Norseman lately. A couple of years ago, they, too, got a bad batch of metal, and quite a number of their normally excellent terminals went out into the world, ready to break. Enter one Vittorio Vongher, a rigger in Italy, who put a couple of those faulty fittings on a boat. He did everything right ‚ appropriate torque, careful measuring, Loc-tite, sealant, the whole deal ‚ but the things failed shortly after installation. At first, Vittorio assumed that somehow he had done something wrong. This was natural, as Norseman has a well-deserved reputation for building literally bulletproof terminals. But then another boat in the area, rigged by someone else, suffered a dismasting when two Norsepeople gave way. When he contacted the agent for Southern Europe, this is the reply he got, as translated by Vittorio:

Good morning Vittorio,
   I have only been told by Norseman Gibb Factory, that there was a batch of fittings made in a wrong material about 2 years ago. This batch of fittings was sent everywhere in the world, so it was impossible to know where and get them back ... Some of the customers complains because one of the characteristic of these fittings was that they looks very rusty after a short period of time. Norseman Gibb replace them. So if you give me more details on the fittings, size, type, quantity, and send me some of them, I will be happy to replace them at no charge. Thank you to let me know.
Regards,
Eric.

   In followup correspondence with Norseman's U.S. reps, I found that there were only about 200 faulty terminals produced, and that "approximately" 200 had been accounted for. In the words of Norse rep Ty Goss:

   "The problem was that the steel provided to the factory was not up to the required specifications and it was not known to be deficient until over 2 years after they were shipped. What happens is the body part of the fitting will rust and if left unchecked can crack and fail."

   Unfortunately, there was, to my knowledge, no notice of this, anywhere, prior to Vittorio's inquiry. The defective terminals went all over the world; I could have installed them and never known about it until they broke. Now, thanks to the Web, we have a notification of sorts here, but, Hey Norseman! Wake up!

   The final thing to consider about reputations is whether or not they are based on knowledge. That is, if someone recommends me, is it because they have the technical and logical and ethical chops to recognize good work and right living, or do they just like how shiny the fittings are? This is where customer education comes into play. For instance, the vast majority of people who buy and read the "Rigger's Apprentice" do not become riggers. They might not even change how involved they are with the rig, to any noticeable degree. But I get letters saying how what they knew enabled them to be really annoying customers, the kind of people who know what they want, and are able to express their wants intelligently and concisely. These same people are also likely to attend seminars, scan technical articles, and hang out with other educationally-inclined people. The reason we have professionals do work for us is usually because we want to have time to do other things, not because it is something of incredible complexity, like brain surgery or VCR programming. But that is no reason to give up all involvement; be educated and you can be better assured of a good finished product. And speaking from my own experience, an educated client is usually a joy to work with, partially because we spend that much less time going over the basics, and partly because it is more fun to have a conversation than to deliver a lecture. Besides, we learn a lot from those people, so our own education can be ongoing.

   Fair leads,

      Brion Toss