The Tailor Who Measured Twice

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In a small town at the foot of the mountains, there lived a tailor named Berg who always measured every customer twice. He measured once when they came in, and again before he cut the cloth. "A cloth cut is a cloth lost," he liked to say. Customers had long since stopped asking why, since his clothes always fit them perfectly.

One spring, a consultant named Ms. Doyle arrived in town. She wore a sharp gray suit and carried a tablet, and she had been hired by the mayor to "modernize local businesses." She spent an afternoon in the tailor's shop, watching him work, and she made notes. "Mr. Berg," she said at the end, "you are an excellent craftsman, but you are wasting twenty minutes per client on your second measurement. If you measured only once, you would finish twenty percent more suits a week."

Berg thought about it, for he was not a stubborn man. "And would those suits be as good?" he asked. "Of course," said Ms. Doyle. "The first measurement is enough, if you're careful." Berg shrugged. It was the eve of the annual festival, the busiest week of his year, and the mayor himself had ordered a new jacket. For the first time in thirty years, he measured the mayor once, wrote down the numbers, and cut the cloth.

He worked all night, and the jacket was ready at dawn. It looked beautiful on the hanger. At noon, the mayor arrived in the shop, put it on, and stood in front of the mirror. The mayor's face, as he looked, slowly changed. The left sleeve ended three fingers above his wrist, and the right shoulder pulled tight, as if the jacket had been made for a slightly different man.

"Berg," said the mayor, in a very polite voice, "I'm supposed to make a speech in front of the whole town in two hours." Berg looked at the sleeve, and at the clock, and at Ms. Doyle, who had just come in and was staring at the floor. "I understand, Mr. Mayor," he said. "Please stand still."

From a drawer, he took out his old tape measure, the one with the numbers almost rubbed away, and he measured the mayor from the shoulder to the wrist. Then he measured him again. The mayor's speech was a success, and nobody in the audience noticed that he had hemmed the new sleeve in his lunch break. Ms. Doyle left town the next morning, and Berg went on measuring every customer twice for the rest of his life.