Tha Editor hopes it may save him trouble if he attaches to this article the reservation familiar in another column, that he ''does not hold himself responsible for the opinions or assertions of correspondents.""
Since war broke out I have had to replace the seven men in my office with ten women. My wages bill is higher now than it ever was, though the work has not risen ta efficiency in the same degree. For from it- And there are one or two things that I would like toj tell the girls in my office. I would like to tell them in a friendly way—if that were possible. But I know it isn't. Before I had got well begun, 1 know that the staff would, one and all, put on their hats, powder their faces, and quit. Girls have brought the American habit of quitting to a fine art nowadays.
Tae Tater or Time Well, my first query would be "why do you object to keeping time?" Only one man in twenty is persistently unpunctual: only one girl in twenty has any idea what punctuality means. With a whole staff wandering in fifteen minutes late every morning, the net loss in hours) is quite substantial. Then when they are in, why not get to work at once? When a male clerk arrives, he says Good morning," changes into his office coat, and without any further preamble gets into his day's drag. Not so the girls. First there's the hair to arrange and fluff up, the blouses to pull straight, the complexion to examine and restore with a surreptitious dab of powder. Then, of course, there's the -quite essential conversation with Clarice or Emma about last night, the sympathetic inquiry 4s to whether the morning's post has brought anything from "Him" or whether it's "all off? or not with the new one. Then Oh, just a minute till I jot down the address of that little dressmaker who makes such duchy blouses for $3.50 each. Yours is simply lovely. Where did you buy the stuff?" ete. All of which takes up another quarter of an hour, while the books are still unopened and the telephone bell rings unheeded.
I should like to ask my staff why so many girls take on jobs as efficient typists when they don't know the first thing about English or punctuation. Some of the letters I have had handed to me for signature!!! Sense wrong, grammar bad, everything muddled and when the girls regard the position of stenographer as an important one which only an intelligent, well-educated person can fill, the sooner will the worries of dictators of letters cease.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.