The Waterbury Democrat., 1941-08-09

wNnn~ tense purchases ' ~soM and what the Department of Agriculture buys of surplus commodities.
 Just the other day, for instance, the Procurement division an- nounced that 1t had saved the gov- ernment 1000 on snake bite kits. Now at first thought you might imagine that the only need the government had for snake bite kits would be to administer when Re- publicans bit Democrats and vice versa, or when New Dealers bit businessmen and vice versa. But that isn't the situation at all.
 The Departments of Agriculture and Interior have field agents and forest rangers, and then there's the Border Patrol, all of whom fre- quently run into real rattlesnakes, copperheads or gila monsters and have to take steps. Heretofore, there have been no standard speci- fications for snake bite kits, and the prices have varied. But the Specifications division of the Pro- curement division got all the boys together recently, got them to agree to a standard kit, and by making purchases in quantity, saved Uncle Sam the II grand.
 SILKLESS TYPEWRITER
 RIBBONS
 This matter of standardization of specifications on non-defense pur- chases is what the Procurement division is working on all the time, now, and it's bringing results. The drive for sinplification has been indirectly spurred on by the de- fense program, for in the desire to get civilian manufacturing down to as few lines as possible, in order to switch productive capacity over to defense items, corners have to be cut.
 The OPM crowd got Treasure Procurement interested in this work, and now all government agencies have to submit their purchase or ders to this division for analysis, simplification and check.
 The thing even gets down to Sights over typewriter ribbons. There are specifications, it seems, and then there are alternate speci- fications. Your normal, peacetime typewriter ribbon is a special, fine- ly woven silk with over three hun- dred threads to the inch. There's a shortage of these fine weaves, however, because of the demand for balloon silk. So the govern ment has adopted alternate speci- fications in which they take a coarser weave in the typewriter rib- bons. Soldiers who go up in ball. looms should think of the hard ships they work on government clerks, because of this, whenever sky-riding.
 Incidentally, the government used over million typewriter ribbons last year. And still more incident ally, the government used nine mill lion pencils, 94 million sheets of carbon paper and 180 million paper clips. As that's nearly paper clip and half for every man. woman and child in the country, it can be taken that maybe this is what holds the democracy together. Linked end to end, they should stop the German invasion. May be, also, it explains the steel short- age.
 TALE OF SURREALIST TILE
 Purchase of all this stuff, right down to the mops and pails the scrub ladies use on the marble cor- riders, is conducted not from the Treasury, but from the Procure ment divisions own building over on the other side of the railroad tracks in southwest Washington. It's well off the tourist path, but it's sight to see, nevertheless. It's a kind of half-office. half-ware- house building, presided over by Director Clifton E. Mack.
 On one floor, you walk along a corridor till you come to room where you think the architect must have gone nuts. The room is tiled but with every kind of tile ever heard of, and no two square feet are alike. Nobody works in the room. for it would drive even a psychoanalyist screwey in two sec onds. But whenever the Procure ment division has to buy tile, they take the salesman to this Dali room and say, Give us price on No 67."
 Bids on government orders are opened every morning in the fam ous bid room, No. 798. It has a mai box of the street-corner variety al the back, and sharply at 10 8. m. the two men in charge of the room start opening bids and reading over loud speaker system the of fers submitted by competitors fol government business. The room seats about 100 people, and. the salesmen and tradepaper reporters are usually on hand. Public read ing of the bids is required by law but before the contracts are let they are tabulated by the Con- tract and Purchases section, which makes the awards.
 Not all the savings of the Pro- curement diyiion are measured ir chicken feed. They saved mil lion bucks last year, on $5 mill lion order of fixtures for defense housing, but nobody paid much attention to 1t.