The $50 Lie

Last week I lied to an Amish man so I could pay him more money.

Let me back up. Last cutting of hay, we went to make small square bales and the knotter wouldn’t work. Now, this isn’t a new baler. It’s a New Holland 273, built in the early ’70s, a machine that was on hundreds of thousands of farms across the Midwest and Northeast. I’m a lot of things, but I am not a knotter man.

We spent four hours on it. We measured. We compared everything to the owner’s manual. We scratched our heads. We greased, ran more hay through, and tied knots by hand, the typical untrained monkeys trying to fix a knotter.

The before knot, this isn’t hodling anything but a passing thought of a knot.

So I took it to our local expert, a 70-year-old Amish man named Sam who started working on balers fifty years ago. He called me and said, “I got her fixed. Only took me about 20 minutes.”

This morning I went to pick it up. He showed me what he did. He adjusted the needle and sharpened a knife. Two simple jobs, and I couldn’t find either one, even with the manual.

The fixed knot, not perfect but servicable.

I asked what I owed him. “How’s 20 bucks sound?”

I didn’t hide my surprise. I pulled out my wallet and told a little white lie, that I only had a fifty. He replied he would go in the house and get me change. I insisted he take the whole thing.

Driving away, I kept thinking about how people value their own expertise. Sam has seen more in fifty years of servicing balers than I will in my life, and he has a skill nobody else around here has. What I paid him fifty for, I’d have paid several times that to get this baler running.

The owner’s manual is back in the toolbox. It has the diagrams. It doesn’t have what Sam knows, and I’m not sure where that goes when he hangs it up.