Читать книгу Dumbells of Business - Louis Custer Martin Reed - Страница 4

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A YOUNG man had a job with an old organization.

The job was not that of General Manager.

Nor was it Department Manager.

It was not a managership of any kind, character, quality or description—all claims to the contrary notwithstanding.

It was just a job.

It was the kind of job that any young man with an eye on ideas and a finger on the future, might have with any old Organization steeped in stability and pickled in policy.

In other less alliterative language, we might smooth down our shirt-front and say that the young man had A Chance.

If we cared to toss off all restraint and emphasize the statement with grape-juice profanity, we might say that the young man had a Very, Very good chance.

But he didn’t know how to take care of his chance.

He took chances with his Chance.

And one day it got away from him.

When the Boss handed him his passports, he asked for an explanation, and the Boss passed him one, medium well done.

It ran as per follows, WITNESSETH:

“Young Man,” heaved the Boss, scratching his right ear pleasingly with his left thumb, “the reason we are decorating you with the Order of the Canned is because we have found that YOU LEAK. And any concern that does not plug the leak the moment they locate it, will soon be sitting around garter-high in the mire of misunderstanding.

“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 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.

“Then when the other comes back with a rib-rocker on the first man, you scamper back again and break the news to Number One.

“The other day you eared-in on a conversation I was having with my partner about one of our men, and in exactly eleven minutes by our beloved Office Clock the whole Force had tabulated the tidings.

“Before I had a chance to talk to the man myself, he came at me with the logical deduction that he had a right to be informed at first hands on a matter concerning himself that seemed to be as well known around the Works as the hour for Knocking off Work.

“And WITNESSETH: Sometimes when Party of the First Part has been discussing important matters in conference with himself or others, you have hopped around like a coolie with the dhobe itch, trying to sniff out some clue on which to ground a bit of gab.

“I have never walked through the office that I did not spot you back of a door holding a whisper-fest with somebody, and, if my memory isn’t fooling me, we have never yet talked here in the office about lifting or lopping prices, or changing selling plans, or shuffling Salesmen, or shaking up the territory, that it has not leaked out to the Road Robbins long before we wanted it to.

“We now know for a cinchety that you are the guilty goop because you fell for a plant that we had cleverly framed up with the kindly assistance of myself.

“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.

“The one rule that you have not yet sponged up is that Success is more than brains and bustle. Success is the art of closing up the Exhaust occasionally.

“I can find no doubt in any hole or corner of my mind that you have many times scratched your busy little head and wondered why you have remained in the same job all these centuries while other men not so clever as your oblique self have sailed right past you into the harbor of Heavy Responsibility With Correspondingly Light Pay. The reason is as stated in yon foregoing.

“Be it known to you further that no Business can succeed without Loyalty and Co-operation. Modern Business demands of every man that he be loyal, or be off.

“Pin-headedness, tale-peddling and office politics are barnacles on the barque of Business, and the Firm that does not scrape them off is doomed to decay.

“Any man with a brow an inch over all, should know that the lot of the Leaker means to be ultimately despised by the very men he has made confidants of.

“Every time you have started one of those he-said-that-you-said-that-I-said stories of yours, you have rawed up all the decent men of this Office.

“Today you stand about as popular around here as a hair in the butter; but you don’t know it, because, like all back-fence babblers, you are foggy up on the perceptive plane, and you think that the man who listens must like yourself be loose.

“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.

“Thanking you for your kind attention, and asking you to now kindly consider yourself sunk without warning, I beg to remain etc, etc.”

Having spake after the manner of the hereinbefore mentioned, Comrade Boss removed his eyes from the transgressor, and wheeled around in his chair.

And, taking his pen between his index finger and the back of his hand, began to sign yesterday’s mail.

So.