Atlanta semi-weekly journal. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1898-1920, 1919-05-23

If the amount of insurance issued by the
bureau represented in dollar bills Joined
end to end, the strip OF greenbacks would
extend to the moon and back seven times
This little computation shows you what Won
derful mathematician they have down there
The same lightning calculator has doped it
out that if the women employees of the bureau
alone stood in a row, the row would be
thirteen miles long. And he claims that the
war risk bureau has the prettiest women en-
ployed in Washington. The Job supports thr-
teen thousand employees in all
! This is probably the greatest check-writing
institution in the world. 1t writes more than
a million checks a month. If all this had to
be done by hand, the entire army could be
given jobs looking after its own dependents;
but all of this work is done by MACHINERY
Every person who deals with the bureau is
represented by an individual file, and an ad-
dress plate is printed for each one. 1t keeps
hundred operators busy making plates. One
machine and two girls can now turn out
about twenty thousand checks a day. This
used to require about four hundred employees
All checks are signed by a deputy disbursing
clerk with mechanical device which signs
twenty checks at one time, all signatures be-
ing actual pen signatures.
Checks from the bureau of war risk insur-
ance go to every corner of the world. More
than 10000 checks are mailed monthly to
foreign countries. Checks are sent to Africa
Australia, Belgium, China, Haiti, India,
Japan, Gibraltar, Spain, Syria, Korea, New
Zealand, Portugal Sweden Switzerland and
other foreign lands, each check representing
man from one of these foreign countries
serving in the military or naval forces of the
United States. More than $500 foreign
checks are being held by the bureau because
of suspended mail service Among the checks
held are three which are destined for Ger
many. Over 1000 checks are being held for
persons in Russia and 272 are held for per-
sons in Poland.
More than a ton of mail comes in each day,
and the organization built up to distribute
mail within the bureau is larger than any
private postal or mail system in the United
States. Eighty thousand pieces of incoming
mail each day are the average and more than
$4,000 of these are letters. There are about
$4,000 outgoing letters each day, exclusive Of
checks.
Reading the mail of the bureau Of war
risk insurance is a task which REQUIRES an
intimate knowledge Of the various divisions
of the bureau and the work that each divi-
sion handles Highly trained women. most
of them college graduates. are employed as
mail readers. Each reader must decide from
the text of the letter where it should be re-
ferred and there are thirty-six different sec
tions to which these readers may refer n let
ter. Many of the readers are CAPABLE OF
reading 1900 letters a day each. One hun
dred and thirty people are employed to handle
the mail of the bureau of war risk insurance.
Questions are one of the problems of the
bureau of war risk insurance. The war risk
insurance act is intricate and complex and
the vast majority Of the public does not I'M
derstand it. For this reason the number of
inquiries which comes to the bureau is ex-
tremely large. More than 500 persons come
to the war risk insurance building each day
seeking information, and hundreds Of others
make telephone inquiries. The bureau an
swers questions cheerfully.