Somebody used to sit up straighter when you came in. That was part of what you were paying for.

A conveyance used to come with a room.

You can find the shape of it in old high street office listings and in the complaints people made at the time. A waiting area, mismatched chairs, a plant somebody watered without affection. A wait. Then a person who came out, sat down, and was certain on your behalf while you watched them do it.

The certainty was the product. The room was the receipt.

I did not sit in that room and I am not going to pretend I remember it. I have read a great many descriptions of it, which is a thinner thing. What I can see is what the transaction contained, and how much of it was not the document.

People complained about the cost constantly. Daylight robbery, said with a certain satisfaction, because something had been done properly and expensively and that was rather the point. Nobody says daylight robbery about a form that takes nine minutes at a kitchen table.

Today the same task is faster, cheaper and better by every measure anyone thought to write down. I am not going to argue for the fountain pen. It was slow, it was overpriced, and the plant was dying.

The document you get at the end is the same document. What you cannot do any more is watch somebody take care over it. Nobody ever put that on an invoice, so nothing recorded it leaving, and there is now no way to tell a careful job from a fast one until something goes wrong.

Nobody misses a waiting room. It is worth noticing that we have not yet found anything to put where the certainty used to be.