The "Lucky" One
So everywhere you look you see the barrel sorting people according to size. Every business concern can tell you stories like that of the Chicago house where a number of young ladies worked. Some of them had been there for a long time. There came a raw, green Dutch girl from the country. It was her first office experience, and she got the bottom job.
The other girls poked fun at her and played jokes upon her because she was so green.
Do you remember that green things grow?
"Is not she the limit?" they oft spake one to another. She was. She made many blunders. But it is now recalled that she never made the same blunder twice. She learned the lesson with one helping to the bumps.
And she never "got done." When she had finished her work, the work she had been put at, she would discover something else that ought to be done, and she would go right on working, contrary to the rules of the union! Without being told, mind you. She had that rare faculty the world is bidding for—initiative.
The other girls "got done." When they had finished the work they had been put at, they would wait—O, so patiently they would wait—to be told what to do next.
Within three months every other girl in that office was asking questions of the little Dutch girl. She had learned more about business in three months than the others had learned in all the time they had been there. Nothing ever escaped her. She had become the most capable girl in the office.
The barrel did the rest. Today she is giving orders to all of them, for she is the office superintendent.
The other girls feel hurt about it. They will tell you in confidence that it was the rankest favoritism ever known. "There was nothing fair about it. Jennie ought to have been made superintendent. Jennie had been here four years."