CLOCK-WATCHERS.

Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 211, 18 May 1909, Page 2

CLOCK-WATCHERS.

" I've got a sign hanging in my office," said Herman A. Metz (New York's City Comptroller), "and it 6ays in good big letters that a man who doesn't earn moTe than he gets Arill never get more than he's getting. There is nothing new about that observation, but it's the whole gospel of success." It will be recalled that Mr Metz is the stony-hearted taskmaster who insists that the clerks and others employed by the City of New York must put in the same solid day's work that a private concern would expect of them. He contends that if thi6 were done the taxpayers of the town could have their books kept with fewer bookkeepers, and thereby save a great many thousand dollars yearly in salaries. " What if it does throw a lot of young fellows out of a job !" exclaimed the Comptroller, with a snap of his black eyes. ' "It would be a good tiring for them. A young man with a decent set of brains in his head has no business in a municipal | clerkship — no, nor in a State or Federal j clerkship, either. Nobody but a lazy man or a man without ambition would try 10 get one of these life positions, and there ought not to be any encouragement for them to do it. They ought to be made to ' work so hard that they'll get sick of it, and get out and do something for themselves. " I can't understand what at young man is thinking of to enter the Civil Service. There is no future in it. He may work as hard as he pleases and 6how all sorts of intelligence, but he can't' get advancement on that score. He's got to wait till the stupid old clock-watcher ahead of him is moved up a peg, and that may take years. The smaTt young fellow can't hurry it any. The whole system is a narcotic that drugs the ambition of everybody who becomes a part of it. They all become clock-watchers, with every incentive to be as lazy as possible. " Now in my private business " — and Comptroller Metz is a man of large affairs • — " I won't have a time-clock in my office vand I don't care anything about office hours. I don't care what time a man is at his desk or what time he quits. All; I want i6 results. If one of my men came to me and asked for a day off I'd fire him. He should, know himself whether he can take time ' off or not without asking me. He ought to know more about his particular job than I do — that i6 what I pay him for, and I don't care when he goes fishing so long as he gets away with his work. But if a man will insist on putting himself in the class of day laborers and make a machine of himself — if he's contented to be a dub — you have to make him ring the timeclock. " I have no use for this kind of a fellow, particularly if he's young, and I make itf as hard as I can for him. The trouble with salaried men is that they are cowards, they're afraid to take responsibility, and they are always trying to put it up to somebody else. I won't have that kind in my business if I get on to them. As soon as I find a man is running to me with •What shall I do about this, Mr Metz?' and bothering me or the man just over him with details I fire him. And the ie-. suit is that every fellow in my business office feels his responsibility, and ha6 the nerve to carry it on his own shoulders. And if he divides his time wrong or wastes it, that is his own funeral. He can be as punctual or as easy-going as he pleases, so long as he can show me results at the end of the year. " Now, you can't get this kind of a spirit into a municipal department run by Civil Service rules, and that is why I advise every young man to keep out of the public service if he ever expects to be anybody. And I advise him to keep out of the big firms for pretty much the same reasons. I don't know why it is, but every young fellow wants to work for a big concern. It sounds fine to tell about, maybe, but there's nothing in it. Let him start in \ young with a small concern, and grow up with it. Let him begin as an office boy, and pull off Ids coat and get his hands dirty if he has to, but let nim learn thebusiness from the ground up. "You know," declared Mr Metz, Avith some disgust, " there ain't any good office boys any more. I mean nervy little chaps, wh'o will come for three dollars a week and make themselves part of the business. You might almost say there aren't any office, boys at all nowadays. If you advertise for one you get a whole flock of hulking eighteen-year-olds with high collars and college clothes, who think they're worth six and eight dollars a. week, when they aren't worth their salt. They are too old to be office boy6 and too young and callow to be anything else. " The school system is to blame for this. There are too many high schools, and they are turning out regiments of incompetents. A common school education, without frills, is all that a boy needs to succeed in com- .'

mercial life. He ought to go into business at fourteen to fit himself for even a clerkship at eighteen, and yet he is encouraged — no matter how poor he is — to spend those four years in high school acquiring a taste for neckties and fancy shirts. What good is he when he goes into a business house? And yet he thinks he can walk right into a clerkship, if, indeed, he is as modest as that, and doesn't want to be a manager ! " There are too many high schools and not enough trade schools. The city is filled with small-salaried, discouraged ir-en, afraid of their jobs, who, instead cf being mediocre clerks, ought to be good, selfrespecting carpenters and plumbers and electricians. And they might have Veen if the city had wiped out two-thirds of the high schools and made the pupils put in the four years learning how to do something to make them independent of clerkships. "Of course," went on the Comntrjller, " every business has to have people to do tho routine work, and these people must keep routine hours., But it's a shame to waste good brains on that sort of work, and no encouragement should be given to any system which puts a premium on laziness and attaches a penalty to ambition or stifles it altogether. And this is vhat the city. State, and the Federal Gwernments are doing by making office hours so easy in the public service. Why, theie\s a man in the Finance Department with brains enough to have been a success, and he has plugged away there for fifty-two years. And the pathetic part of it is that he is proud of it ! Proud of being a human vegetable ! "I have nothing to say against the young fellow who goes into the Civil Service as a temporary makeshift until he can get into something better. But it's the chap who has brains but is looking for a soft berth wherein he won't be expected to think for the rest of his life for wh;m I have no use and for whom I've got it in. He'll never make a good routine man with that notion in his head. I wouldn't have such a mollusc in my own business, ax'd I" don't see why the taxpayers should have him in theirs. And in after years these very fellows ought to be thanking me that I tried to save them from such a life. "As business is organised to-day almost everybody has to be an > employee, big and little. But that is not to say that almost everybody should have to ask permission to gd 1 to lunch ox to the ball game. If | popular education were conducted along the right lines so many salaried men wouldn't have to do this. As it is, thou- | sands of men mentally equipped to control their own activities and time are sent into business from the high schools without special training of any kind, and so they } must content themselves with being at best drudges in clean linen. " With this condition of affairs, it is no wonder that New York, with the rest of the country, is full of men who complain that they can't get along and that they have no show nowadays. They have good manners and a gentleman's education, but they can't seem to make good. They don't understand that it is special training and not general culture and boiled shirts that makes a man valuable. And the ' poor devils try and keep on trying to make punctuality and neatness and regular habits and all the other cheap virtues pay a dividend, when all the while the vulgar little office boy who has four years' practical stai-t of them is delivering the real goods and getting the profits over their heads. "And he ought to get the profits. He knows his business from A to Z, Avhile they don't know anything but arithmetic, -penmanship, and the. time of day. And so they go on into middle life, sore and defeated, Avith the maddening conviction that they have abilities Avhich are not appreciated, and that.it Avas luck and pull and unscrupulousness Avhich put the other fellows ahead of them. It Avasn't that at all ; it Avas a case of one man learning business and the other learning basketball. " My advice to young fellows who must Avork for a salary — and that's the case with most of them — is, first to keep out of municipal, State, and Federal departments ; second, to get a job with a hustling^ little concern where business comes first and system af terward ; and third, to quit looking at the clock after the office opens. If they will forget the clock it won't be long before the boss Avill forget it too as far as they are concerned."