he couldn’t see that in this grand, free game of Commerce, it is the
Buyer who has the right of Free Speech while the Seller must temporize
and simulate. At least the Seller must temp and sim up to the time the
Order is signed.
[Illustration: Hypnotizing the Buyer]
He can then go around the corner, if he wants to, and put his thumb to
his nose or call the Buyer anything he can think up that doesn’t carry
too far along the etheric waves. But to indulge any such feeling before
one is off and premises is to invite probable loss of Sale and possible
kick in neck.
But Zeekie, the poor smelt, got it all twisted and thought it was
war-time and that Buyers were going to come up and kiss him when he
arrived and ask him how all the folks were, and carry his suit-case for
him, just because he had something to sell.
When they didn’t do it, but on the contrary, went right on reading
and signing letters and transacting routine office business all the
time he was talking to them, as Buyers in normal seasons enjoy doing,
Zeekie felt that his dignity was being shot at from ambush, and so he
began telling his Prospects different things that they could do if they
didn’t want to buy his celebrated goods.
While no physical harm befell Ezekiel during these clashes, no orders
befell him either, and after working the whole surrounding county
and netting nothing but a large ostrich egg, he sat down at the wabbly
hotel writing-desk on Saturday night and sent the Sales Manager a
Report about those fourteen carloads that made that astute little Baked
Bean shoot to the scantlings when he read it on Monday morning.
It took the Bostonian about one full minute after he struck terra
cotta again to realize that Ezekiel was down with a violent case of
Sales-manic Inflation that could be cured only by the knife. So he
promptly cut off Zeke’s job and wired him to take the Fifteen Dollars
he still had of Dear Firm’s expense money and paddle back to the Old
Home Hamlet with it.
Now we come on with the anti-climax, the fall of the action, and the
close, thus preserving the dramatic unities and giving our readers that
sense of relief which a concluding announcement of ours always brings.
When the Hotel Proprietor received the fateful telegram Monday noon
and delivered it personally to Ezekiel Whiffle at the breakfast table,
the large bucolic appetite which Ezekiel had been vigorously feeding,
suddenly and unceremoniously departed, leaving a whole shredded wheat
biscuit midway between his incisors and the outside of his face. In
fact he entirely forgot it was there until he came to, several minutes
or aeons afterward, and tried to pass a glass of water along the
parched pathway of his oesophagus.
On the thirty-seventh reading of the Farewell Proclamation, Ezekiel
pulled himself together sufficiently to get up from the table and go
out and announce to the Proprietor he was leaving for Chicago on the
3:37. The painstaking little Prop observed for the first time a human
note in Zeke’s way of putting things.
He suggested that there was a fast train an hour later that carried
all Pullmans and got in four hours sooner, if Zeke cared to drive over
to the B. Q. & X. junction a mile away. Zeke thanked him (1st thank
recorded) and said he had just as soon take the Day Coach Train as he
was only going to be on it a day and a night.
Zeke went upstairs to pack his things and had a feeling that his room
somehow was much larger and more comfortable than he had thought it
was, and he sort of hated to give it up.
When the yellow bus came alongside for the 3:37 and the driver
attempted to toss Zeke’s suit-case up on the roof, Zeke took it away
from him and said he guessed he’d walk to the station and get the fresh
air. The driver asked if he might take the suit-case anyway; but Zeke
feared a nickle tip might be expected and he pulled it back and started
off for the Station.
The Bus rumbled past Zeke on the way and Zeke thought they had painted
it or something. Fifteen minutes later when he was still a half mile
from the Station with but 10 minutes to spare, and had just shifted
his baggage from hand to hand for the eleventh time, and was sweating
like a Madras coolie, he got to thinking what a nice accomodation a Bus
was anyway for a little jerkwater like Luke’s Rock, and wished he had
hopped it at the Hotel.
The 3:37 was one hour and fifty-nine minutes late but Zeke didn’t have
anything to attend to at destination that he couldn’t do just as well
sitting here; so he continued his reflections about Life in general and
didn’t grouse even to himself.
After riding a hundred and fifty years on the Day Coach, Zeke finally
reached Chicago with a stiff neck and swollen underpinning but meek as
a mujik. As he was hobbling out of the busy Railway Station a Red Cap
passed him toting two big suit-cases. They had a million labels pasted
all over them and as Zeke humped along behind, he began to inspect the
curiosity.
He was reading “Bombay,” “Constantinople,” “Cairo” and a lot of other
names that he had never heard before, and was wondering what State they
were in, when he heard a voice just behind him call to the Red Cap:
“Here, Boy, put them on this taxi.”
Ezekiel looked up and beheld the Big Silent Man—the man who had
imparted the much needed but disregarded advice on the occasion of
Zeke’s first meal at somebody else’s expense.
“Blackstone Hotel,” said the Big Man as he handed the Red Cap a quarter
and stepped into the Taxi.
That night in a wee inside room on the fourth floor of the Lake Smell
Dollar Up sat Ezekiel Whiffle trying to read the Help Wanted columns
by the dim light that spluttered from a broken gas fixture over the
narrow spring-tooth bed.
He was a sadder but a wiser Ambassador of Commerce.
HOT SKETCH NO. 10
THE MAN WHO ORGANIZED MANUFACTURERS
A TIRED Business Man sat at his busy desk cleaning his nails with his
paper-knife and lamenting in his tired-businessman’s heart the lack of
organization among manufacturers.
The name of this particular t. b. Man was Willyums and he was
well-to-do and had a separate pair of suspenders for each pair of
trousers.
“Just look at the situation,” sighed our fervent plugger for united
action. “Here we manufacturers are, all knifing one another like a
squirming bunch of inch-browed dagoes, when we ought to be solidly
organized and working as a single unit against the iniquitous principle
of labor organization.”
At this point in Willyums’ little round soliloquy the Office Beetle
crawled in and handed him his morning’s mail.
Willyums picked up the letter and read it carefully. It was from a
friendly Compett who complained bitterly about the Government’s unfair
discrimination, and he asked Willyums to offer a suggestion how to head
off all such pernicious activity.
This gave Willyums a great wide opportunity to ventilate his views on
the crying necessity for cooperative action among manufacturers.
He dictated a letter that was all muscle and fibre. In it he urged the
importance of all manufacturers organizing for their mutual protection.
He stated that only through unselfishness on the part of Each, could
the good of All be served; and original things like that.
Willyums then drafted another snorter to send out to such other
manufacturers as he was on speaking terms with, and he pleaded with
them to put their shoulders to the wheel and make every sacrifice for
the furtherance of the Cause.
He said that any man who would not give up his time whole-heartedly to
the work was a stumbling-block in the march of Progress, and he coined
other metaphors and epigrammatic phrases that made his letter sizzle
and spit like a war-whooper at the Big Grove.
When the “copy” was typewritten and delivered back to Willyums to read
and enjoy, he scanned it hurriedly a few dozen times and then handed it
to his Advertising-Manager and told that groove-dweller to cut out all
the personal pronouns so the Trade wouldn’t think it came from J. Ham
Lewis and then gallop the letter off to all the names on the list.
The responses that fluttered back were very encouraging. Everybody
seemed strong for organizing at once, and several letters indicated
subdued excitement.
A number of leading manufacturers soon got together and perfected a
temporary organization and selected a name for the new Association that
read like a serial story.
Business matters of a pressing nature prevented Willyums from attending
the first meeting, but he wrote a strong letter of endorsement and
it was read at the morning session and was much enjoyed by All Those
Present as well as himself.
At this Conference it was decided to hold a big meeting of the whole
Trade and get things going like a busy shipyard, and the place and
date were fixed well in advance so that nobody could stall out.
Willyums wrote the Secretary back another shoulder-to-the-wheel letter
and said he would be there positivoli. But when the time slid up for
him to set sail, he and his wife had a Breathitt County difference of
opinion which threatened to end in Woodlawn Cemetery. It started about
her always leaving the icebox door open, and finished up with a pungent
polemic on his sensitiveness and all-round worthlessness as a marital
leaning post.
Willyums naturally wanted to stick in the ring till the finish, so he
was obliged to wire The Boys that he couldn’t be at the meeting and to
go ahead without him.
The Meeting proved to be a Great Success and a date was fixed for the
First Annual Convention which was to be held at Wagon Springs, Va.,
and all members were notified to be on hand and to bring their wives
and colorless daughters along to enjoy the Entertainment Features and
drink of the health-giving waters generously provided by the Hotel
Management, with the slight assistance of Nature, at five cents per
glass or one cent per paper cup.
Willyums invited Comrade Wife to accompany him and helped her to get
her hat-box through the door and shut the cover of her yawning trunk
and pack into his own little tin-trimmed steamer all the things she had
forgotten to put in her travelling bungalow.
When Willyums arrived at Wagon Springs the Hotel people gave him the
customary welcome of The Hotel Successful which consists in telling
the train-tuckered visitor that they have no record of any reservation
for him and that he will have to sleep on the Town Pump or up in the
pigeons’ quarters.
Willyums smoothed out the bulge in his shirt-bosom and told the Emperor
back of the desk that he was there to attend The Convention, and as
soon as he said this, he lost the two good sleeping-chances referred to
up-page.
This made him as sore as a blistered heel and he went straight to the
Twelfth Assistant Manager and told him (the 12th Ass’t Manager) that
if it had not been for him (Willyums), there would be no Convention at
all, and that he (12th Ass’t Manager) would not be running full-up
in his (Mgr’s) old Hotel, and that if he (M) did not at once provide
him (W) with suitable accomodations, there was going to be a small but
efficient funeral around there.
Willyums got the accomodations all right, including a washstand and
neat little ash tray to put his ashes in; but it was so late when he
and Mrs. Willyums hit the hessian that they did not open up until 10
o’clock next morning, and then he had to go and dig up the lost luggage
so that Madame could drape her matronly Fig. in a new child’s dress.
As a consequence Willyums did not get to the opening session of the
Convention but he pumped palms with a number of delegates and said he
would see them surely at the afternoon session.
The afternoon session was scheduled for 2 o’clock, and so the delegates
got there promptly at 3. Willyums was somewhere about the 3rd hole when
the meeting was called to order because Mrs. Willyums was just a cub at
golf and insisted on doing the 18 no matter what happened. They sweated
back to the hotel along about sundown, barely on speaking terms
because he had told her that the woman did not live who would not cheat
at golf.
The next morning Willyums announced solemnly to his unselfish helpmeet
that he was going to attend the remaining sessions of the Convention
or bust. Whereupon Mrs. Willyums let loose a torrent of real tears and
told him what a shrimp he was to bring her along and then keep her
cooped up in a little ingrowing room when they might both be riding in
the mountains and getting some fresh air.
Willyums was a highly sensitized man and could not endure lachrymal
leaks, and it did not take him long to give in. In fact he caved in,
and accompanied his considerate little wife on horseback, and they had
a very nice time and both agreed that the afternoon would positively be
his to spend at the closing session of the Convention.
When they returned to the Hotel Willyums learned that the Convention
had disposed of all pending matters at the preceding session and had
decided to adjourn _sine die_ and give the last afternoon over to
Unalloyed Pleasure.
Willyums met several delegates coming out of the Convention Hall and
they told him they did not know what they should have done without his
generous cooperation, and thanked him for the Great Assistance he had
been to them all since the very beginning.
_Lesson for Today:_ A Trade Organization never grew strong
on Absent Treatment.
HOT SKETCH NO. 11
THE PERPETUAL PLANNER
FLOPPINGHAM WATERDELL sat in his office, feet erect, smoking his
morning sisal.
And nursing along his habitual grouch against Dear Firm.
Six months before, Floppingham Waterdell had been stricken with the
honor of Branch Manager.
It was the biggest job he had ever managed to throw in all his long
speckled career, but for some foolish reason Dear Firm thought they had
hold of a Whale when they fished him out of the deep blue sea of Job
Searchers.
“The utter planlessness of their work,” sighed Floppingham, re-crossing
his unexercised legs and taking another long, legumenous puff at the
root of all evil.
“They send me here to take charge of an office that has heretofore
been conducted absolutely without system, and then they expect me to
go out and do business without telling me where they want me to go, or
how they expect me to go about it. They scuttle my plans and they don’t
offer any themselves. All they say is, ‘Go get the business.’”
“All work should be planned beforehand,” continued Floppingham,
reflectively. “No business man should attempt to do business until he
knows his territory thoroughly and the character of his Prospects—even
down to their peculiarities and hobbies, thus eliminating lost motion
in the Approach, and simplifying the road of ingress.”
From the foregoing irridescent little exerpt from Floppingham
Waterdell’s daily conferences with himself over the deficiencies of his
Firm, the reader has come to the conclusion, or not, as the case may
be, that Floppingham was himself a rhinoceros of no small heft when it
came to Business Efficiency.
And indeed Flop was.
Every file in the office, every colored thumbtack on the map, every
drawer of his desk, every card-index, chart, letter and cuspidor sang
of The Office Efficient.
And all accomplished within six short, shrimpy months!
For examp: When Floppingham took charge of the dump, you couldn’t
find a letter in the files without looking for it. Three months later
you didn’t have to go to the files at all when you wanted to look
at a letter. You would go to a Card Index where you found all the
meaty paragraphs of the letter arranged on a card alphabetically,
chronologically and hypodermically, including the writer’s telephone
number and all such other thrilling news as appears at the apex of the
average letterhead.
As a check against error, you then would get out the original letter
from the regular files and compare the card with the letter, or the
letter with the card, or vice versa, and the trick was done! Positively
no plush curtains or false bottoms to deceive you!
It took one girl only four months to get this system in shape so she
could take off the skid-chains.
Before Floppingham assumed charge, nobody around the office even knew
how many steps a thirsty bookkeeper had to take to make the water-tank
at the opposite side of the room and get back to the revolving perch.
Nor did anybody know the amount of time that was consumed per step in
such a wild orgy.
But Floppingham, through his original system of Step Reduction, figured
out that if the bookkeeper would lengthen his stride to the Thirst
Muffler, he would thereby reduce the number of steps; or, in other well
selected words, reduce the time consumed in wasting Dear Firm’s time
drinking water.
Thus if ten steps were saved through Step Standardization, and each
step consumed one second, that would mean a net saving of ten seconds
per trip to the Trough. Granted that six trips per day were made during
the winter months, and six hundred during the Dog Season, the result
would be a grand total of umpty-ump hours per year per clerk, or a net
saving of ifty-ift dollars per year to the Business.
And just to show you to what a fine point the reasoning of the
Efficiency Engineer can be spun out without snapping, we will add
that Floppingham always took into consideration the length of an
applicant’s legs when hiring a clerk.
These were but a couple of Floppingham’s efficiency installations. He
had a million of them. They ranged all the way from Sales Planning to
counting the number of puffs to a hemp panatella. He wore out the seat
of his trouserial furniture figuring them out.
One day Dear Firm sent him a letter swathed in purple satire,
suggesting that Efficiency was a means, not an end, and that if he felt
that his Branch could do a little Business once in a while without
greatly impairing its uselessness, they would send him a bright young
man with a plaid vest to help him make sales.
Whereupon Floppingham Waterdell adjusted his glasses, took up his
efficient pen that had pulled him through many a stall, and wrote
out plans and specifications covering the kind and quality of man he
desired.
It is possible that the talent and virtues and experience of the Human
Race, taken as a whole, might have perhaps been able to squeeze up to
Floppingham’s requirements as set forth by Flop under numerous heads
and sub-heads designated as (a) (b) (c) and so forth—the kind, you
know, that many Government employes and other bluffologists revel in.
When Dear Firm received from Floppingham this last brilliant
contribution to the records of Commercial Pish, they winked one eye
clear to the roots and then dictated the following Appreciation:
“We don’t know just when it happened, nor just how it happened, but
the Business World today is infested with a new stripe of grafter—the
Efficiency Eel, to which School you seem to have a Rhodes Scholarship.
“Efficiency Eels are Word Wizards and Figure Fixers of a very clever
order, and we poor uneducated kanoops of the workaday-and-night world
have been caught by the swing of their phrases and the flare of their
‘facts.’
“Not a yap of them ever did a day’s work since he left college, and
couldn’t get out and sell a bill of postage stamps at 50 and 5. Instead
of planning for business, they make a business of planning. They
are always getting ready, but they never start. They are piffling
pollywogs on the plane of the Practical, but past grand masters in the
philosophy of Bunk.
“The reason they keep planning and organizing and systemizing all the
time is because they know they are nix glox on Performance. And plans
without performance are like teeth without jaws.
“Show us the gunk that is always laying the blame for his own failure
to lack of efficiency and system in his employer’s business, and we’ll
show you a gunk who is stalling for fair.
“For six months, come Yom Kippur, you have been ‘planning’ to bag a
little business, and if we kept you there for six years, or six hundred
years, you would still be planning. You are a planner and not a worker.
You can MAKE plans all right, but you could not EXECUTE one of them if
it laid its head on the block and handed you the axe.
“It isn’t your fault, Mr. Stall, that we have been slow to get your
curves. We are just like hundreds of other firms—just plain, ordinary
yappoos who would rather hire an outside man at $20,000 a year to do
nothing but plan, than give half the salary to an inside man and
have him perform. But now that we are ON, would you mind considering
yourself submarined and greatly oblige etc.”
_Lesson for Today:_ One bill of goods sold is worth more
than a dozen planned.
HOT SKETCH NO. 12
THE TWIN-SIX PHILANTHROPIST
A POVERTY-PANNED mill owner who had only been able to finger in a
bare ten million after twenty gruelling years of grimy grind at Board
Meetings and Stock-holders’ Seances, sat wearily at his flat-topped
Mahogany and heaved a long abdominal sigh at the hellward tendency of
the children of today.
“It’s all due to the Pernicious Activity of these agitators,” he said,
wiping away a great big humanitarian tear. “All that I am today I owe
to the hardships I suffered when a child.”
Here he turned on a few more big salty boys and then continued;
“Poverty is a blessing and an educator, and yet these here agitators
come along and want to take out of my mill the lucky children that are
having a chance through my bounty to become worthy citizens of this
great, glorious Republic of ours.”
He was just on the verge of adding a few trembling mushmellows about
the stars and stripes waving in the free, pure air of America when his
emotion got a hackenschmidt stranglehold on his large oily thorax, and
he couldn’t splutter it across.
When he had recovered his composure and wiped the sweat-beads from
his nice thick neck, he got to thinking some more of all he had done
for the town by giving employment to its skinny-legged children, and
putting more money in circulation, and all that sort of fly-smacked
mediaeval economics, and he choked up again at the thought of how
little his beneficence had been appreciated.
In his great paternal heart he knew that his motive in doing all this
unselfish thing for the thin-wristed tots of the town was as pure as
the lotos flower, and that there was no low-lying thought of the good
old coin he was pulling down on the investment.
In fact he was so sure of it that when he chanced one day to notice a
wee ripple on the sweet still sea of Graft in the shape of a parboiled
attempt to increase the children’s wages from One Penny to Two Pennies,
he was about as indifferent as a gunless man in a tiger’s lair.
Many other little things went to show the philanthropic purpose of King
Paunch’s acts. He had, for instance, a noonday feed served to the child
workers which enabled them to romp joyfully back to the looms twenty
minutes sooner each day, and a little later he again got busy with
his short pencil and long head and figured out how he could cut off a
certain yard space for a playground without cutting off the profits.
He stood wide-legged and willing at all times to prove to anybody that
the children were better off in his mill working ten hours a day than
they would be in their homes, and that when it came to Loving Care and
Attention the laughing loom had any Day Nursery in the land walloped to
a wobble.
There was no opportunity, he contended, for the youngsters to acquire
vicious habits, except a lint-cough, and by keeping them standing all
day catching threads to the rhythm of the loom-buzz, they would not run
up against wicked temptation to Walk the Streets.
Every time he would get through telling about his charitable works, he
would feel for his halo to see that it was on straight.
In certain moments of mental liberality he would concede that his mill
did not include quite all the conveniences and comforts of Heaven, but
generally speaking, it was about the most constructive hangout, from a
physical, mental and moral standpoint, that you could find south of the
Pearline Gates.
There was a touch of pathos in the sight of this willing martyr to the
cause of Progress and Purity getting all sweatted up arguing his side
of the case against those fanatics who were obsessed with the crazy
notion that the place for little children was in school.