Woodruff County news., 1907-01-17
DIFFER IN HABITS
CARE OF DESKS NOT AN INDlcA.
 TON OF ABILITY.
While Some Men Must Have Things Just So, Others Do Much Work Amid the Utmost Apparent
 Confusion.

Curious about mems desk habits" said a man whose business takes him about more or less into various sorts of offices. "I was in an office yester- day where I had occasion to write something"
 Here, sit down at my desk says the man. I guess you can find place there
 And I did find a place there after moving enc or two things, but that was all I found-a place just big enough to write in, and that square in the middlS of the desk.
 This was a fiat top desk and, eX- cept for that small, bare spot in the middle, it was just covered with pa pers and things of every description, and these not folded or stacked os set up about in any orderly manner, but all apparently in the utmost confusion.
 "The desk looked as though it's owner, when he had got through with a document or bill, just pushed it back from the bare spot on the desk. And so he had stuff piled up on his desk overlapping and lying around any way all around the top if his desk, and actually sloping down from all around to that bare spot like little flat val ley, where he wrote in the center at the front.
 And this was a business man, too, and, moreover, as I was told, man who has accumulated a comfortable property in the pursuit of his business. And I found him, in the dealings I had with him, not only personally ami able in all things, as indicated by his cheery call to use his desk, but fair and exact in his business ways.
 How he ever did business with his desk filtered up in that way, how he ever found anything there that he wanted, or how he ever remembered anything I don't see; but as far as I know he never forgot anything that was important.
 Tt made me think of something minister asked me once. I was saying to this minister, talking about preach ing eXtemporaneously that I should think when man got up in the pulpit to preach without any notes that he'd be apt to forget some of the things he wanted to say and the minister said that sometimes you might forget things in that way, but then he recall ed what an experienced old clergyman had said to him in reply to the same suggestion from himself, which was to El. sI.s, tI,. ,1,., forgot to say were usually the things not worth remembering.
 And maybe it was so about the for gotten things in the pile of papers OF that desk
 But he wasn't the only man I have met who kept his desk apparently in the greatest disorder, but was never theIess successful; and then I have known plenty of men who went as far the other way and who would have a fit unless they could keep everything on their desks just so.
 The inkstand must be here and the stamp box here, and the pen rack here; all just so, and kept so; and with no litter anywhere, with every JnlnS Tree ana CI6dE cblO III OluSl And I have known men who couldn't write unless they had their paper squared just right, and all that; pre- else men, who must have everything just so before they could get to work; all the very opposite of the man with the filtered desk, who has at least in his favor the fact that he doesn't worry himself over 'trides, but keeps on serene through it all.
 And while I have known men who must have everything just so neat about their desks, fresh blotters and clean inkstands and all that, l have known other men who didn't care if their desks were foot thick with dust, and who only asked that their things should not be moved or shifted about; just simply and only that their desks be let alone.
 AS a matter of fact there is in these days less and less disorder in business methods and more and more system; this in an age of system"