The office photocopier broke down, so the manager called in a repairman. The repairman takes one look at the machine, draws an 'X' at the problem part, and hands the manager a bill for $500. The manager was shocked at the price, and demanded an itemized bill. The repairman simply wrote:
Marking the 'X' - $1
Knowing where to put the 'X' - $499
I started Googling the Picasso "principle" about it being a lifetime to know how to do it, but it turned into Googling this one instead. Found a snippet, "Karl Steinmetz (German-born, U.S citizen), the well known electrical engineer who worked out many details of a.c. theory and was responsible largely for the adoption of a.c. for commercial use, was once called in by the General Electric Company to examine a poorly performing transformer. After a few minutes, Steinmetz marked an x on the transformer core and said, “It will work if you take off the turns from this x to the end.” The prescription worked well, and Steinmetz later sent G.E. a bill for his service of $10,000. The company official thought the bill excessive and asked for the itemization. Steinmetz then sent them a more detailed bill: For putting x on transformer core : $1; for knowing where to put the x: $9999." It's funny that in today's world, both Picasso and Steinmetz take "minutes" to do this, but in perhaps earlier tellings, it took hours for Picasso to do his work and days for Steinmetz: http://edisontechcenter.org/CharlesProteusSteinmetz.html
I had no idea that this quote has such a delightful and well-documented origin. I'd only heard the story told about Picasso (and various mechanics and engineers). A great example of how these things morph over time.
The story is delightful because it pitted two great Victorian aesthetes against one another. Ruskin had said this about Whistler:
I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now;
but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas
for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.
So Whistler sued for defamation and was examined by Ruskin's lawyer:
Holker: Did it take you much time to paint the Nocturne in Black and Gold?
How soon did you knock it off?
Whistler: Oh, I 'knock one off' possibly in a couple of days – one day
to do the work and another to finish it.
Holker: The labour of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?
Whistler: No, I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.
The insinuation in the lawyer's question ("how soon did you knock it off?") is hilarious!
Whistler, by the way, was a great wit and had a famous skirmish with Oscar Wilde:
Did I read the same page you did? It seemed quite generic and gave the following rating. Which means it hasn't been explicitly disproven. In fact, I'd suggest that these things might indeed have happened if the skilled worker, needing to prove his worth, used such a glib line because he'd heard it somewhere else. But I'm skeptical too, that's why I was Googling. You'd think someone, somewhere would know how long each took and was more consistent in the retelling. Or that they would have kept the itemized receipt for the joke.
LEGEND: Hollow yellow bullets are the ones most commonly associated with "pure" urban legends — entries that describe plausible events so general that they could have happened to someone, somewhere, at some time, and are therefore essentially unprovable. Some legends that describe events known to have occurred in real life are also put into this category if there is no evidence that the events occurred before the origination of the legends.
Wow, thanks for the link! I would never have thought that the joke was based on an actual incident.
For those who are wondering about the Picasso principle, it's based on a story about a woman who asked Picasso why he charged $5000 for a painting, when it only took him seconds to paint it. He replied, "Madam, it took my entire life!".
