Of All Things Part 7

I could spell this out with alphabet blocks quicker and let her copy it) ... and that it was in excellent shape at that shape--er ... or rather, at that _time_ ... er ... period. New paragraph.

"We are, comma, therefore, comma, unable to ... h.e.l.lo, Mr. Watterly, be right with you in half a second.... I'll finish this later, Miss Kettle ... thank you."

When the mail is disposed of we have what is known as Memorandum Hour.

During this period every one sends memoranda to every one else. If you happen to have nothing in particular about which to dictate a memorandum, you dictate a memorandum to some one, saying that you have nothing to suggest or report. This gives a stimulating exchange of ideas, and also helps to use up the blue memorandum blanks which have been printed at some expense for just that purpose.

As an example of how this system works, I will give a typical instance of its procedure. My partner, let us say, comes in and sits down at the desk opposite me. I observe that his scarfpin is working its way out from his tie. I call a stenographer and say: "Take a memo to Mr.

MacFurdle, please. _In re_ Loosened Scarfpin. You are losing your scarfpin."

As soon as she has typed this it is given to Mr. MacFurdle's secretary, and a carbon copy is put in the files. Mr. MacFurdle, on receiving my memo, adjusts his scarfpin and calls his secretary.

"A memo to Mr. Benchley, please. _In re_ Tightened Scarfpin. Thank you. I have given the matter my attention."

As soon as I have received a copy of this typewritten reply to my memorandum we nod pleasantly to each other and go on with our work. In all, not more than half an hour has been consumed, and we have a complete record of the negotiations in our files in case any question should ever arise concerning them. In case _no_ question should ever arise, we still have the complete record. So we can't lose--unless you want to call that half hour a loss.

It is then almost lunch time. A quick glance at a pile of carbons of mill reports which have but little significance to me owing to the fact that the figures are illegible (it being a fifth-string carbon); a rapid survey of the matter submitted for my O.K., most of which I dislike to take the responsibility for and therefore pa.s.s on to Mr.

Houghtelling for his O.K.; a short tussle in the washroom with the liquid-soap container which contains no liquid soap and a thorough drying of the hands on my handkerchief, the paper towels having given out early in the morning, and I am ready to go to lunch with a man from the Eureka Novelty Company who wants to sell us a central paste-supply system (whereby all the office paste is kept in one large vat in the storeroom, individual brushfuls being taken out only on requisitions O.K.'d by the head of the department).

Both being practical business men, we spend only two hours at lunch.

And, both being practical business men, we know all the subtleties of selling. It is a well-known fact that personality plays a big role in the so-called "selling game" (one of a series of American games, among which are "the newspaper game," "the advertising game," "the cloak-and-suit game," "the ladies' mackintosh and over-shoe game,"

"the seedless-raisin and dried-fruit game," etc.), and so Mr. Ganz of the Eureka Novelty Company spends the first hour and three-quarters developing his "personality appeal." All through the tomato bisque aux croutons and the roast prime ribs of beef, dish gravy, he puts into practice the principles enunciated in books on Selling, by means of which the subject at hand is deferred in a subtle manner until the salesman has had a chance to impress his prospect with his geniality and his smile (an attractive smile has been known to sell a carload of 1897 style derbies, according to authorities on The Smile in Selling), his knowledge of baseball, his rich fund of stories, and his general aversion to getting down to the disagreeable reason for his call.

The only trouble with this system is that I have done the same thing myself so many times that I know just what his next line is going to be, and can figure out pretty accurately at each stage of his conversation just when he is going to s.h.i.+ft to one position nearer the thing he has to sell. I know that he has not the slightest interest in my entertainment other than the sale of a Eureka Central Paste Supply System, and he knows that I know it, and so we spend an hour and three-quarters fooling the waiter into thinking that we are engaged in disinterested camaraderie.

For fifteen minutes we talk business, and I agree to take the matter up with the directors at the next meeting, holding the mental reservation that a central paste supply system will be installed in our plant only over my dead body.

This takes us until two-thirty, and I have to hurry back to a conference. We have two kinds of "conference." One is that to which the office boy refers when he tells the applicant for a job that Mr.

Blevitch is "in conference." This means that Mr. Blevitch is in good health and reading the paper, but otherwise unoccupied. The other kind of "conference" is bona fide in so far as it implies that three or four men are talking together in one room, and don't want to be disturbed.

This conference is on, let us say, the subject of Window Cards for display advertising: shall they be triangular or diamond-shaped?

There are four of us present, and we all begin by biting off the ends of four cigars. Watterly has a pile of samples of window cards of various shapes, which he hangs, with a great deal of trouble, on the wall, and which are not referred to again. He also has a few ideas on Window Card Psychology.

"It seems to me," he leads off, "that we have here a very important question. On it may depend the success of our Middle Western sales.

The problem as I see it is this: what will be the reaction on the retina of the eye of a prospective customer made by the sight of a diamond-shaped card hanging in a window? It is a well-known fact in applied psychology that when you take the average man into a darkened room, loosen his collar, and shout "Diamonds!" at him suddenly, his mental reaction is one in which the ideas of Wealth, Value, Richness, etc., predominate. Now, it stands to reason that the visual reaction from seeing a diamond-shaped card in the window will...."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The problem as I see it is this."]

"Excuse me a moment, George," says MacFurdle, who has absorbed some pointers on Distribution from a book ent.i.tled "The World Salesman," "I don't think that it is so important to get after the psychology of the thing first as it is to outline thoroughly the Theory of Zone Apportionment on which we are going to work. If we could make up a chart, showing in red ink the types of retail-stores and in green ink the types of jobber establishments, in this district, then we could get at the window display from that angle and tackle the psychology later, if at all. Now, on such a chart I would try to show the zones of Purchasing Power, and from these could be deduced...."

"Just a minute, Harry," Inglesby interrupts, "let me b.u.t.t in for half a second. That chart system is all very well when you are selling goods with which the public is already familiar through a.s.sociation with other brands, but with ours it is different. We have got to estimate the Consumer Demand first in terms of dollar-and-a-quarter units, and build our selling organization up around that. Now, if I know anything about human nature at all--and I think I do, after being in the malleable-iron game for fifteen years--the people in this section of the country represent an entirely different trade current than...."

At this point I offer a few remarks on one of my pet hobbies, the influence of the Gulf Stream on Regional Commerce, and then we all say again the same things that we said before, after which we say them again, the pitch of the conversation growing higher at each repet.i.tion of views and the room becoming more and more filled with cigar smoke, Our final decision is to have a conference to-morrow afternoon, before which each one is to "think the matter over and report his reactions."

This brings the day to a close. There has been nothing remarkable in it, as the reader will be the first one to admit. And yet it shows the secret of whatever we have not accomplished in the past year in our business.

And it also shows why we practical business men have so little sympathy with a visionary, impractical arrangement like this League of Nations. President Wilson was all right in his way, but he was too academic. What we practical men in America want is deeds, not words.

X

TURNING OVER A NEW LEDGER LEAF

New Year's morning approximately ninety-two million people in these United States will make another stab at keeping personal and household accounts for the coming year.

One month from New Year's there will be approximately seventy-three of these accountants still in the race (all started). Of these, sixty will be groggy but still game and willing to lump the difference between the actual balance in their pockets and the theoretical balance in the books under the elastic heading "General Expenses" or "Incidentals," and start again for February. The remaining thirteen, who came out even, will be either professors of accounting in business schools or out and out unreliable.

This high mortality rate among amateur accountants is one of the big problems of modern household efficiency, and is exceeded in magnitude only by the number of schemes devised to simplify household accounting. Every domestic magazine, in the midst of its autobiographical accounts of unhappy marriages, must needs run a chart showing how far a family with an income of $1,500 a year can go without getting caught and still put something aside for a canary.

Every insurance company has had prepared by experts a table of figures explaining how, by lumping everything except Rent and Incidentals under Luxuries and doing without them, you can save enough from the wreckage of $1,200 a year to get in on their special Forty-Year Adjournment Policy.

Those publications which cannot get an expert to figure out how much you ought to spend per day will publish letters from young housewives showing how they made out a budget which in the end brought them in more money than they earned and had the grocer and electric light company owing them money.

The trouble with all these vicarious budgets is that they presuppose, on the part of the user, an ability to add and subtract. They take it for granted that you are going to do the thing right. Now, with all due respect to our primary and secondary school system, this is absurd. Here and there you may find some one who can take a page of figures and maul them over so that they will come out right at the bottom, but who wants to be a man like that? What fun does he get out of life, always sure of what the result is going to be?

As for me, give me the regular method of addition by logic; that is, if the result obtained is twelve removed from the result that should have been obtained, then, ergo, twelve is the amount by which you have miscalculated and it should, therefore, be added or subtracted, as the case may be, to or from the actual result somewhere up in the middle of the column, so that in the end the thing will balance. And there you are, with just the same result as if you had worked for hours over the page and quibbled over every little point and figure. There is no sense in becoming a slave to numerical signs which in themselves are not worth the paper they are written on. It is the imagination that one puts into accounting that makes it fascinating. If free verse, why not free arithmetic?

It is for the honest ones, who admit that they can't work one of the budget systems for the mentally alert, that the accompanying one has been devised.

Let us take, for instance, a family whose income is $750,000 a year, exclusive of tips. In the family are a father, mother and fox terrier.

The expenses for such a family come under the head of Liabilities and are distributed among six accounts: Food, Lodging, Extras, Extras, Incidentals and Extras. For this couple I would advise the following system:

Take the contents of the weekly pay envelope, $14,423.08 (if any one is mean enough to go and divide $750,000 into fifty-two parts to see if I have got it right, he will find that it doesn't quite come to eight cents, but you certainly wouldn't have me carry it out to any more places. It took me from three yesterday afternoon until after dinner to do what I did). Take the contents of the envelope and lay them on the kitchen table in little piles, so much for meat, so much for eggs, so much for adhesive plaster, etc., until the kitchen table is covered. Then sweep it all into a bag and balance your books.

Balancing the books is another point in the ideal system which often makes for trouble. Sticklers for form insist that the two sides of the page shall come out alike, even at the expense of your self-respect.

It is the artificiality of this that hurts. No matter how much you spend, no matter how much you receive, at the bottom of the page they must add up to the same thing, with a double red line underneath them to show that the polls are closed.

But since this is the accepted way of doing the thing, we might just as well concede the point and lay our plans accordingly. First take the sum that you have left over in the household exchequer at the end of the mouth. Put it, or its equivalent in check form, on the table in front of you. Then, working backward, find out how much you have spent since the first of the month. This sum is the crux of the whole system. Divide it into as many equal parts as you have accounts. For instance, Food, Rent, Clothes, Insurance and Savings, Operating Expenses, Higher Life. If you can't divide it so that it comes out even, tuck a little bit on the Higher Life account. And, as the student of French says," _Voila_" (there it is)!

Perhaps you have wondered what I meant by "Higher Life." I have. It might be well to state it here so that we can all get it clear in our minds. Under the "Higher Life" account you can charge everything that you want to do, but feel that you can't afford. If you want to take in an inconsequential theatrical performance and can't quite square it with your conscience, figure it out this way: By going to that show you will become so disgusted with the futility of such things that you will come out of the theater all aglow with a resolve to do a man's work in the world just as soon as you have caught up with your sleep.

Surely that comes under "Advancement" or "Higher Life."

Insurance budget helps always include under "Advancement" money spent for lectures. Now, it may be that I have drifted away from the big things in life since I moved out into the country, but somehow I can't just at this moment recollect standing in line at a box office for a lecture. But then, my home life is very pleasant.

Lectures would be a very convenient heading, nevertheless, to have in your budget. Then, any little items that slip your attention during the month you can group under lectures and mark off ten paces in your advancement chart.

By way of outlining beforehand just what you can spend on this and that (and it is usually on "that") it might be well to take another family with a representative income. Let us say that there are four in the family and that the income is about $1,000 per year too small. If such a family would sit down some evening and draw a chart showing father's earning capacity with one red line and the family spending capacity with one black line, they would not only have a pleasant evening, but they would have a nice, neat chart all drawn and suitable for framing.

There is one little technical point that the amateur accountant will do well to remember. It gives a distinction to the page and shows that you are acquainted with bookkeeping lore. It is this: Label your debit column "credits" and your credit column "debits." You might think that what you receive into the exchequer would be credited and your expenses debited, but that is where you miss the whole theory of practical accounting. That would be too simple to be efficient. You must wax transcendental, and say, "I, as an individuated ent.i.ty, am nothing. Everything is all; all is everything." There is a transcendent Account, to which all other accounts are responsible, and hence money turned over to the Cinnamon Account is not credited to that account, but rather debited to it, for Cinnamon hereby a.s.sumes the responsibility for the sum. As money is spent for Cinnamon, its account is credited, for it is relieved of that responsibility. Don't start wondering where the responsibility finally settles or you will throw something out of its stride in your brain.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "They would have a nice, neat chart suitable for framing."]

Some people profess to scoff at the introduction of bookkeeping into the running of the household. It is simply because they never tasted the fascination of the thing.

The advantage of keeping family accounts is clear. If you do not keep them you are uneasily aware of the fact that you are spending more than you are earning. If you do keep them, you know it.