The whole overburdened Office Staff were stop-work observers of everything that went on in the office from a giggly conversation among the girls down to delivering a bottle of crystal spring water for the ice-cooler, and of course they all saw and remembered how Ellie went into the President’s office on all fours to apply for the job.
Hence when they now saw him swank past them full of superior swish and driving his heels to the floor like a Grenadier Guard, they naturally began to develop that warmth of fellowship toward him that one feels for the cramps.
Had Elliott not been by profession a Bookkeeper, he would have made a good Haberdasher. When it came to practical Salesmanship he had about as much experience as a sponge diver. Hence he possessed many essential qualifications of the modern blank-cartridge Sales Director, as psychically discerned by the President at the outset.
While Elliott might be described as a traveled person, he was not what you would exactly call a globe-trotter in the strict sense of said term. He had on several occasions joined the Sunday Excursion to Churubusco, Indiana, with the white duck panties and the blue serge Double Breasted. Also he had been twice to Chicago; once during his honeymoon, and once when he went there to get his teeth filled, and in so doing made the local horseshoer sore on him for life.
We mention this irrelevancy merely to show that when it came to skipping here and there over the cornbelt, and getting back to the Home Town safe and sound and unrobbed, Elliott could hold his own with the best of them.
Elliott possessed still another essential to successful latter-day sales management. He was one rhinoceros on System. In less than three months after he had set sail upon the hazardous sea of Sales Promotion, he had everything on the premises mapped and charted and indexed and cross-indexed and sub-indexed and super-indexed forty-seven different ways.
Any ordinary question put to him about the Business or the Weather would be followed by the pulling out of numerous little drawers and card-indexes and files and charts and things until the Questioner had forgotten what it was he asked about, or had gone on to other matters or to sleep.
Elliott’s highest qualification for his job, however, lay in his early-discovered ability to write a very superior quality of nagging letter to the Salesmen under him. When it came to the Quibble & Nag stuff, Elliott had every corn-fed Sales Manager in the land rolled up like a carpet.
Having himself never sold a Bill of Goods in his tiny conventional life, and being barely able to tell the Goods from a large knobby sack of apples without first walking all around them and squinting at them from different angles, he was insured at all times against writing the Sales Force upon anything that might be of any importance whatever to the Business.