Louis Custer Martin Reed

“ If you had stood on the corner when the morning whistles blew, and watched the dinner-pailers heading up Main Street, you could have picked the workers of Fairman from the toilers of Grabit with your eyes 22° off centre.
The Grabiters all had that “I wasn’t-hired-to-do-that” air, and groused about the Boss in low dismal tones all the way from liver-and-coffee to forge and furnace, and back again. Every shoulder balanced its chip; and grouch, gruff and grump settled over the Works so thick you couldn’t rip it with a rapier. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Sales Increase for last year was only 120 percent. It should have been 850 percent. The fault lies with my Sales Manager.”
“True, he is a good slob, but he is not good enough. My Salesmen all like him and plug hard on his account, to say nothing of their own; but they don’t plug hard enough.”
“What I need is a Sales Chief who is not stocked up with the dry-bones of Salesmanship—someone who comes from the outside and brings a fresh, crisp point of view—someone who knows nothing at all about the Selling Game. That’s the stunt these days! My present man is in a rut. ”

“ Were it not for the red-nosed fact that here and there in this Organization is a man foolish enough to be loyal to the institution that enables him to close down his troubles when he closes down his desk, the whole Office would by now be torn with internal strife like a rat-tailed Roadster, and we would be headed for the rocks of riot and rebellion.
“Your up-stairs piping is so defective that [15] everything you take in at the ears runs out of your mouth. You hear one man spill some remark about another, and you scamper off with your little red eyes to tell the other. ”

“ Men think they push their own business to greatness, but they don’t. Nine out of ten have greatness thrust upon them by national advertising, but you never hear of them chasing the Agency that did it up the boulevard trying to catch and laurel it for pulling them out of the puddle of commercial provincialism. ”

“ Every time it comes to changing copy in the ads, they have to throw him and blindfold him to keep him from re-writing it himself and running in a lot of snappy, pungent stuff of the come-one-come-all, we-strive-to-please variety.
Alfred William doesn’t understand why a salesman should ride in a Pullman any more than why the Trade shouldn’t wiggle up on its abdomen and beg for the Goods. ”

“ Every little while he gets an emergency call from some big industrial patient who pays him a steel magnate’s salary to come out to their plant and sit around smoking dollar cigars and twisting his moustache and looking wonderfully wise until such time as he can quietly find out what their own Sales Manager’s plans are for the coming season, and then in a Confidential Report to the Board, recommend them as his own good, original, incomparable stuff. ”

“ All the married men in the office used to sit tightly non-commital when Mark raved. Their silence was about as quiet as a Miners Protest Meeting but it got right by Mark every time. He just kept on baiting everybody and maintained that no Business Man ever worked at maximum efficiency until he was buckled and had a man’s responsibility and some incentive to spur him on to Greater Achievement. ”

“ Every time a certain Divine Righter landed a good old jaw-breaker on the enemy he would say that it was god’s coaching that did it, and every time he got one in the abdominal area that doubled him up like a folding-bed, he would shake his finger at the victor and splutter out, “You wait! God will punish you yet!” ”

“ Thus it was that Bill in time made no dark secret of his Real Opinion of any man who thought he had to starch all up like a Bank President just because a pull with the Powers had made him a Buyer instead of a Bill Clerk. ”

“ He figured that men of such muggy mentality didn’t care to spend any time in their dull homes, and so he couldn’t see any approximately sane reason for shortening working hours.
Fairman had the comical delusion that by expanding wages and contracting the workday he could cut off a lot of worry from the minds of his laborers and their weary wives, and that this in turn would mean increased bodily vigor, clarity of thought, efficiency of action and other things that would sound well if we could think of them at this moment. ”

“ OUT among the gnarled oaks of Squirrel Cove there buzzed a busy manufacturing plant.
It had been established since Time wore a bib, and, as far back as History could recall, had been handed down from Whiskers to Whiskers without a break.
The same old Superintendent with his chew of Fine Cut tucked away in a back-cavity, was always on hand each generation to bury the father and drill the son into the mysteries of Production and Distribution. ”

“ When it came to the Quibble & Nag stuff, Elliott had every corn-fed Sales Manager in the land rolled up like a carpet.
Having himself never sold a Bill of Goods in his tiny conventional life, and being barely able to tell the Goods from a large knobby sack of apples without first walking all around them and squinting at them from different angles, he was insured at all times against writing the Sales Force upon anything that might be of any importance whatever to the Business. ”

“ Constant worriment over the passage of some Law in the selfish interest of Public Good by which he might have to give up his 500 precious child charges to the ruthless and demoralizing influence of home and school, reacted upon his liver and it began to reach out and kick him in the spine when he wasn’t looking.
There was not the least sign anywhere around the organic or functional premises to indicate that his condition was aggravated by the thought that he might have to employ grown-ups at slightly stretched wages, and we have therefore no right to diagnose any man’s case afar off. ”

“ Away off somewhere in Thibet or in Sumatra there may have been some petty local question that Ed was not wisdomed-up on, but everything that took on the character of a national or international issue, he could discuss from basement to belfry. He was as much at home in the busy arena of Politics and Business as he was in the wide realm of Science and Philosophy. ”

“ But in due and good time it came to pass that all those Salesmen on Elliott’s staff that were not buying clapboard homes on installment, slapped in their resignations and politely told Ellie and His System to go to hellenstaythere.
This, however, did not cause so much as a tropical ripple on the sea of Serenity upon which Elliott Buckingham Tudor-Smith was gliding so smoothly. As fast as one Salesman would up and kick off his breechin’, Ellie would hire another, and each time he got a better man than the man who quit. ”

“ When the intruder had vanished, Commander Boss got up, ran his long temperamental digits through his top-fringe and pounded out into the manufacturing department where he proceeded to raise from fourteen to sixteen separate and distinct kinds of scarlet hell for the general lack of initiative and commonsense around his plant.
Things went on in this happy homelike fashion until one fine warm Spring day when Brigadier Boss up and booted the whole bunch of bungling department heads into the great Out of Doors and set about to effect a re-organization. ”

“ Emerson says that every institution is the lengthened shadow of the kanoop that started it, and we are not mentioning this just to show how clubby we are with Ralph’s sayings, but to clear up any outstanding doubt that the institution of which Alfred William Clerkmind is the head and front, and coat, pants and collar-button, reflects in every detail the spirit of the big, broad, ruddycheeked Captain of Industry that steers it.
An idea might walk into that Works and hang around for six months, and not a man in the whole outfit would invite it to come in and sit down. ”

“ Some day you will learn, young man, that a tight tongue makes a sagacious sky-piece—that to speak well is to cheat hell—that the chain of Successful Business is linked with loyalty—and the Leaker lands in Limbo long before the last lap’s run. ”

“ And at every session of the Rappers’ League he was as open about it as a woman with a secret.
All these things Burra Boss quietly eyed-in from time to time, as Bosses have the lowdown habit of doing.
And so one bright Spring Morning about eleven minutes past ten he called Bud into the Throne Room.
[161]
“Young man,” quoth he, “you have been for several years sitting in with a bunch of office beadles without becoming one of them.
“It is no simple cinch for a young man to hold himself aloof from the piffle and puff of Office Politics and to evolve ideas in an intellectual graveyard. ”

“ One day about six months after the Home Breaker had been purchased, Slobbings met with a serious business throw-back. No one was to blame but himself. Motoring had interfered with his Business and he had cut his Office from his visiting list.
Among other things there was an over-ripe note at the bank and he was obliged to produce the necessary piastres within twelve hours. So without slipping a syllable to his wife he up and sold the car, receiving therefor an amount so far below original cost that it made him dizzy to look down at it. ”

“ He was one of those Model Employees who always pitch the ball so the Boss can hit it. Whenever the Old Man would ask him a question he would burst a [76] blood-vessel straining to answer it so that it would stack four-square with what the O. M. thought about the matter.
To sum up, this young Sales and Advertising Manager of the hitherto tabulated Plow Factory, was, confidentially speaking, habitually scared to a pea-green that he would offend the Boss and lose his good hundred-dollar job. ”

“ Searching through history he found that all the other great and good benefactors of the Race had always run up against the cross or the hemlock in time, and so whenever he was not perorating with fist-pounding positives, he was lying back sad-eyed and resigned, trying to acquire a forgive-them-for-they-know-not-what-they-do look, and breathing forgiveness heavily through every pore. ”

“ AND, since we propose to run this roost harmoniously—radiating a wee wisp of sunshine and fellowship wherever we can, and making Business a pleasure instead of a punch-up—there does not seem to be any place around these puritanical precincts for a leaky radiator.
“You are bright and clever, and you don’t injure your spine trying to get out of the path of an idea, and, by all the rules but one, you should shoot right to the top of any business. ”

“ Bill’s first week as Buyer saw him billy-sundaying every salesmanic trail-hitter that struck the Works. But somehow the Open Arm stuff seemed to convey to visiting Salesmen the impression that Bill as Buyer for the Works intended to lay in a million dollars’ worth of their Stuff. When he told them that he wasn’t in the market, they couldn’t seem to assimilate the tidings and just continued to hang on until the whistle blew and the regular daily imitation of the Rush from Pompeii commenced. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here and there in this worryful World of Business you will occasionally find some old moss-chest who still holds that Salesmanship means SELLING GOODS, and not Charts, Maps, Conferences and After Dinner Oratory. ”

“ They shared in the profits of their Concern and didn’t have to knock down Bus Fares any more in their expense books, and so they were full of joy and jump.
They got after the disgruntled Customers of Grabit like bees after blossoms and did not exactly have to shoot up the place to scare any of them away from their old connections.
Grabit’s Salesmen were drawing down their good old $100 a month salary, and turning in vouchers for street-car fares, and so when they ran up against the Order Baggers of Fairman [178] they were able to put up about as strong a rebuttal as a girls’ debating society. ”