The Waterbury Democrat., 1942-06-11

which he distributes to friends. Tn,
 chain letter mentality swings int
 full action then, and the result
 a piece such as the following revela
 tory document which has been go
 ing the rounds of the governmen
 departments:
 THE GUIDE TO
 ADMINISTRATIVE WORK
 TIL CONTACT
 JOE ON THAT
 ITO do administrative work 1T
 the government at Washington, al
 you need is on of1lce, 8 desk witt
 two wooden boxes and three bug. gers on 1t, and a secretary in the next room. As soon as you have gotten seated at your desk in the ofice, three huge porters appear tc move two strangers in with you and you sit around awhile and si- lentiy hate each other.
 Finally they get your telephone connected. By this time you have learned your secretary s name, They have changed the number on your office door. So you get into another office by mistake when you come back from lunch and you work there several days be- fore you discover 1t isn't yours.
 Eventually, you get back into your original office. By this time you have a new secretary with a name that sounds like Zrrshvtt, and you are now ready to go to work, which leads you to glance at the two boxes on your desk. People come into the oftlce periodic. ally and put papers into one of the boxes. It Is your job to get them out of that box and into the other one, whence they will go to someone else.
 DESIGN FOR WORKING
 Put the junk in two piles on ton of your desk. Try each day to get most of 1t changed over from one pile to the other: then you can go home. Next day get most of the stuff back into the other pile, dribbling some into the outgoing box. Be sure to check your name of the list, orLthey1l bring 1t back to you. By this time 8 new accum- ulation will be found in the incom- ing box.
 Tn time the piles get 50 high you decide to report sick and stay home 8 few days, hoping 8 lot of the junk will somehow vanish during your absence. It won't. When you come back the pile is two feet high, you have a new secretary, the position of your buzzer buttons is different, your telephone number has been changed, three more desks have been moved into your of1ce, and your name is 10 longer on the door. There is a note on your desk, addressed to Joe. It reads. "It's on my desk, but haven't had chance to read 1t yet. I'm swamped."
 You open your desk drawer and 8 squirrel hops out. The place where your building is was a park six weeks ago. At this point there is nothing you can do but hold a conference.
 "A conference is slightly or- ganized method of wasting time. Habitual conferees have unhappy home lives and would rather sit in the office and jaw each other there than go home and be jawed. During the average conference there Is a lot of, "I1l contact Joe on that" and, My thought is we better table that for week."
 Finally the chairman says, Let's get together tomorrow for two hours," and you stumble back into your oftlce blind from the poison gas you have been breath ing. The piles on your desk have grown still further. The building has only two stories so you can't leap to your death. Your secre- tary would probably shoot you, if she were them and if you asked her, for she is well trained. Any how, it's already 10 p. rn., so you curl up in the desk drawer and sleep fitfully until dawn, when 1t starts all over again.
 SERIOUS SATIRE
 How much fact and how much satirical fiction there is in this document can perhaps best be judged from one of the greatest problems which government agen. cies have = getting enough help. Pirating of employees from one agency by another has been corn- mon. Outside of Washington, in war production industries, the War Manpower Board has had to issue a directive to prevent pirating by rival employers. But not in Wash- ington.
 The resultant pirating of work. CTS has been terrific. The only re- striction on civil service employees transferring from one job to an- other Is a system or priorities, from one to five. Army and Navy are in One War Pro- ductlon Board is in Two. Civil Service Administration itself Is in Three, and so on, every depart ment having Q number. An eni. ploye in a Glass Three agency can transfer to Class two, stay there . few weeks, and then transfer to a ClaSg One agency. nrobably