"Grub is Ready. Get Your Gang Together"
"You have only worked two days and now you ask for time off. What do you want it for?" asked the oily-looking foreman.
"I am scheduled to take a civil service examination to-morrow," was Richardson's reply.
"A civil service examination! Going to quit me, Eh? Not if I know anything about it. You're fired. Come and get your time right now," exclaimed the enraged telephone boss.
"That suits me all right," said Richardson in an indifferent tone. He received his four dollars and walked unconcernedly out of the place.
That evening Richardson, four dollars richer, spent several hours under my instruction, and I made an effort to prime him full of the information I had collected for the examination. Promptly at nine o'clock the next morning we were both on hand at the Naval Station, equipped with a banana each for lunch, to take the six-hour test. There were seven other aspirants representing seven types of the human species, from a shabbily dressed stevedore to a foppishly attired bank clerk, and each had little or no knowledge of the nature of the test which was about to begin. After the examination had been in progress about an hour, Richardson and I were the only ones left—the other poor beggars had given up in despair. With our coats off, we answered the nine questions in the required time and afterwards retired to the lawn, where we were asked to demonstrate our practical knowledge of a sextant. We were instructed to measure off four red flags, which were so arranged that they formed a circle with the point on which we stood as a pivot. We were given ten minutes to perform this feat. Richardson handled the instrument like a veteran. I was unable to locate the final flag through the lense of the sextant on account of a multitude of red banners flying from a man-of-war lying alongside of a dock near-by. After fumbling around in a vain effort to find the right red flag in the maze of the ship's signals, and realising that my ten minutes were fast fading away, I decided to take a long shot and do a little guess work. I took my vernier reading from the biggest flag I could see. It turned out to be a good guess, for I learned afterwards that my entire circle read three hundred and sixty degrees, one second.
The next day we were both notified that we had passed the examination—Richardson, the student, receiving a mark of eighty-six per cent.—and myself, the instructor, eighty-five per cent. We were now in line for appointments as sub-inspectors of dredging on the Pearl Harbour Naval Base, in the employ of the United States Navy Department at $3.60 a day and board—with double pay on Sunday. This made an average of one hundred and ten dollars clear money a month.