It has always been considered a breach of good manners to pull out one's watch and look at it in company. It is true in the office as well as in the drawing room. The clock watchers are impolite. It has also been considered a breach of good manners to hold a guest against his will against the conventional hour for his departure. The employers who habitually keep their employees after closing hours are equally impolite. It is a question of honor, too. Time is money, and the time grafters, whether employers or employees, are dishonest.
When one employee goes over to the desk of another it is not necessary for the second to rise. The first should wait until the one at the desk looks up before speaking unless he is so absorbed in his work that he does not glance up after a minute or two. Then he should interrupt with “I beg your pardon.” It makes no difference if one of the employees is a woman and the other is a man. Work at an office can be seriously impeded if every time one person goes to the desk of another the other rises. So many times the whole conversation covers less time than it takes to get out of one's chair and sit back down again. In some places subordinates are required to stand when a superior speaks to them, but as a general thing it is not necessary. In such houses it is correct to play the game according to the general standard and to act according to the rules set down by the men who are in charge of affairs.
There is no person so wretched or so poor or so miserable but that he can find other people who are more wretched, poorer, or more miserable. At the same time there is no person so superior, so wealthy, or gifted but that he can find other people who are more superior, more wealthy, and more gifted. It is a part of good manners to recognize superiority when one finds it. Youngsters entering business can sit at the feet of the older men in the same business and learn a great deal. Knowledge did not enter the world with the present generation any more than it will depart from it when the present generation dies. It is just as well for young people to realize this. Age has much to teach them. Experience has much to teach them, and so have men and women of extraordinary ability. “I have never met a man,” says a teacher of business men, “from whom I could not learn something.” All of us are born with the capacity to learn. It is those who develop it who amount to something.
Petty quarrels should be disregarded and grudges should be forgotten. This piece of advice is needed more by women in business than by men. Men have learned—it has taken them several thousand years—to fight and shake hands. They have a happy way of forgetting their squabbles—this is a general truth—after a little while, and two men who were yesterday abusing one another with hot and angry words are to-day walking together down the hall smiling and talking as gently as you please.
The Office Boy. If the office boy in a big business house where much of the work is done at a white-hot tension—the office boy in a busy Wall Street office during the peak of the day's rush, for example—could write his intimate impressions they would make good reading.
The temper of the great American business man is an uncertain quantity. Famous for good humor and generosity as a general thing, he is, for all that, at his worst moments the terror of the office boy's life. Nervous, worried, tired, and exasperated, he is likely to “take it out” on the office boy if there is no one else at hand. There is no defense for such conduct—even the man who is guilty would not, the next day in his calmer moments, defend it. Meantime, what shall the office boy do?
A hot, tired man with papers fluttering over his desk, his telephone ringing, and three men waiting in line to talk to him about serious problems connected with the business, yells, “What do you want?” when the office boy comes to answer the bell.
“You rang for me,” the boy answers.
“I rang half an hour ago,” the man snaps.
In reality he rang two minutes before. Shall the office boy remind him of this?