“There’s a draft here that would blow you out of your chair,” he said. “Give us another table!”
“I thought – ” began the head waiter.
“Never mind what you thought,” snapped Mr. Hertz. “It’s what I think. I’m paying for this lunch.”
And he picked out a table that pleased him better and sat down. It happened to be a table whose occupants had just left.
“And get some of this stuff cleared off, too,” he said, adding sarcastically, “unless you are just being paid to wear a dress suit in the daytime.”
Mr. Peters laughed apologetically, trying to make the head waiter think that Mr. Hertz was just an old joker. The head waiter laughed, too, but without spirit. Mr. Hertz didn’t laugh at all.
“These captains think they own the world,” he said to Mr. Peters. “They’d kill you if they could.” And Mr. Peters thought that maybe it wasn’t a bad idea.
“Now let’s see,” muttered Mr. Hertz, picking up the menu and turning to the waiter who stood by, “what’s here that’s fit to eat? Anything?”
“The chicken hash is very nice today, sir,” said the waiter.
“You would suggest that,” snapped Mr. Hertz. “I never sat down at a table that the waiter didn’t try to make me take the chicken hash. What do you get, a rakeoff on all the chicken hash you sell?”
The waiter smiled uneasily.
“Good night!” said Mr. Hertz. “What a layout. Why don’t you have something that people can eat once in a while? What’s that you’ve got on your shirt front? That looks good.”
The waiter looked in embarrassed fashion at his shirt front, but couldn’t think up a good answer. There was a spot there, but he didn’t know what it was. So he said nothing.
“A surly boy, eh?” said Mr. Hertz. “Well, that takes a quarter off your tip.” And then, with a knowing nod to Mr. Peters, “That’s the only language these wops understand.”
“Eric is a Swede, aren’t you, Eric?” asked Mr. Peters with forced geniality, trying to get the conversation out of its nasty tone.
“Swedes are the worst of all,” said Mr. Hertz. “Well, Swede, have you got any mussels?”
“Not this time of year,” said the waiter. “The clams are very good, sir.”
“O, not this time of year eh? Well, that’s the first time I ever knew that mussels had to have a certain time of year. What do they do, just come out in the summer? Why don’t you just say that you haven’t got ’em? Nobody asked you their habits.”
“I’ll have some chicken hash,” put in Mr. Peters. He really didn’t want it, but he wanted to do something to discredit Mr. Hertz.
“Well, you’re easier than I am,” said Mr. Hertz. “I can’t eat any of this truck on here. Broil me a small steak and make it snappy. And have it well done on the edges, too. Don’t bring it to me half cooked.”
“Any potatoes, sir?” asked the waiter, in evident relief that the first stage of the ordeal was over.
“I said potatoes! Are you deaf? Hashed in cream potatoes! Do you want me to write it out for you? And some new peas, too, if you think you can remember all that.”
The waiter disappeared, perspiring from every pore.
“These waiters give me a pain in the eye,” said Mr. Hertz. “They never listen and then when they get out in the kitchen they match to see what they’ll bring you. In my traveling around the country I’ve found that the only way is to treat ’em rough if you want to get any service at all.”
“That’s one way,” replied Mr. Peters, snapping a piece of roll at the saltcellar.
Mr. Hertz drew out of his pocket a neat packet of letters, from which he extracted one. It proved to be something written in connection with the Oldtown Drop Forge and Tool company, and it interested Mr. Peters only slightly more than it would interest you if I were to tell you about it. Mr. Peters would not have been interested in the private correspondence of Lucretia Borgia if offered to him by Mr. Hertz. In fact, Mr. Hertz was in a precarious position, if he only knew it.
A detailed résumé of this document consumed perhaps four minutes, at the end of which Mr. Hertz looked around the room and then banged heavily on the table, frightening Mr. Peters out of his rather sinister musings and attracting the attention of the head waiter.
“Come here!” he shouted.
The head waiter came over.
“What are they doing – fishing for that food out in the river? We’ve been waiting half an hour.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said the head waiter. “You ordered something that took a little extra time to prepare. I’ll see where it is.
“Extra time! How long does it take you to put a steak on the fire and broil it? It’s been three-quarters of an hour now. I could slap a cow to death and get a steak out of it in the time you’ve taken.”
Unfortunately, the waiter put in an appearance at this moment, bearing Mr. Peters’ chicken hash.
“Well, here you are!” snarled Mr. Hertz. “What do you do out there in the kitchen – play chess?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said the waiter. “Your steak took a few minutes – ”
“You’re sorry? What do you think I am? I’m hungry! My God, I’ve seen rotten service in my time, but never anything that could beat this. Where’s my steak?”
“I’m getting it right now, sir,” said the waiter.
Mr. Hertz’s voice was now raised to a pitch in which most men speak over a long distance telephone.
“Where’s the manager?” he bellowed. “I’ve stood all of this I’m going to!” And he pushed his chair back like a man about to go and look for a manager.
Now, as any friend of Mr. Peters knows, there is one thing which upsets him probably more than anything else, and that is to be made conspicuous in a public place. And Mr. Hertz was rapidly attaining a conspicuousness usually reserved for men with sidewalk fits. As he turned to project his venom more fully on the members of the restaurant staff, Mr. Peters reached over and dropped something in his glass. And Mr. Hertz, to refresh himself after his tirade, immediately obliged by drinking it.
The waiter came rushing up with the steak, but Mr. Peters was alone at the table.
“The gentleman has left the room, Eric,” he said. “I don’t think he’ll be back for his steak. I’ll take the check – and here’s something for yourself.” And, taking one more bite of his chicken hash, Mr. Peters put his napkin on the table and walked out.
As he passed through the anteroom he sensed a commotion in the gentlemen’s lavatory, but, as two hospital attendants seemed to be headed in that direction, he decided to go back to his office.
“You can give Mr. Hertz’s overcoat to some good horse,” he said to the coatroom girl as he passed. “He won’t need it where he’s going.”
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How to
Get Things Done
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A great many people have come up to me and asked me how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated. My answer is “Don’t you wish you knew?” and a pretty good answer it is, too, when you consider that nine times out of ten I didn’t hear the original question.
But the fact remains that hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country are wondering how I have time to do all my painting, engineering, writing and philanthropic work when, according to the rotogravure sections and society notes, I spend all my time riding to hounds, going to fancy-dress balls disguised as Louis XIV or spelling out GREETINGS TO CALIFORNIA in formation with three thousand Los Angeles school children. “All work and all play,” they say.
The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one. I have based it very deliberately on a well-known psychological principle and have refined it so that it is now almost too refined. I shall have to begin coarsening it up again pretty soon.
The psychological principle in this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed
to be doing at that moment.
Let us see how this works out in practice. Let us say that I have five things which have to be done before the end of the week: (1) a basketful of letters to be answered, some of them dating from October, 1928 (2) some bookshelves to be put up and arranged with books (3) a hair-cut to get (4) a pile of scientific magazines to go through and clip (I am collecting all references to tropical fish that I can find, with the idea of some day buying myself one) and (5) an article to write for this paper.
Now. With these five tasks staring me in the face on Monday morning, it is little wonder that I go right back to bed as soon as I have had breakfast, in order to store up health and strength for the almost superhuman expenditure of energy that is to come. Mens sana in corpore sano is my motto, and, not even to be funny, am I going to make believe that I don’t know what the Latin means. I feel that the least that I can do is to treat my body right when it has to supply fuel for an insatiable mind like mine.
As I lie in bed on Monday morning storing up strength, I make out a schedule. “What do I have to do first?” I ask myself. Well, those letters really should be answered and the pile of scientific magazines should be clipped. And here is where my secret process comes in. Instead of putting them first on the list of things which have to be done, I put them last. I practice a little deception on myself and say: “First you must write that article for the newspaper.” I even say this out loud (being careful that nobody hears me, otherwise they would keep me in bed) and try to fool myself into really believing that I must do the article that day and that the other things can wait. I sometimes go so far in this self-deception as to make out a list in pencil, with “No. 1. Newspaper article” underlined in red. (The underlining in red is rather difficult, as there is never a red pencil on the table beside the bed, unless I have taken one to bed with me on Sunday night.)
Then, when everything is lined up, I bound out of bed and have lunch. I find that a good, heavy lunch, with some sort of glutinous dessert, is good preparation for the day’s work as it keeps one from getting nervous and excitable. We workers must keep cool and calm, otherwise we would just throw away our time in jumping about and fidgeting.
I then seat myself at my desk with my typewriter before me and sharpen five pencils. (The sharp pencils are for poking holes in the desk-blotter, and a pencil has to be pretty sharp to do that. I find that I can’t get more than six holes out of one pencil.) Following this I say to myself (again out loud, if it is practical) “Now, old man! Get at this article!”
Gradually the scheme begins to work. My eye catches the pile of magazines, which I have artfully placed on a near-by table beforehand. I write my name and address at the top of the sheet of paper in the typewriter and then sink back. The magazines being within reach (also part of the plot) I look to see if anyone is watching me and get one off the top of the pile. Hello, what’s this! In the very first one is an article by Dr. William Beebe, illustrated by horrifying photographs! Pushing my chair away from my desk, I am soon hard at work clipping.
One of the interesting things about the Argyopelius, or “Silver Hatchet” fish, I find, is that it has eyes in its wrists. I would have been sufficiently surprised just to find out that a fish had wrists, but to learn that it has eyes in them is a discovery so astounding that I am hardly able to cut out the picture. What a lot one learns simply by thumbing through the illustrated weeklies! It is hard work, though, and many a weaker spirit would give it up half-done, but when there is something else of “more importance” to be finished (you see, I still keep up the deception, letting myself go on thinking that the newspaper article is of more importance) no work is too hard or too onerous to keep one busy.
Thus, before the afternoon is half over, I have gone through the scientific magazines and have a neat pile of clippings (including one of a Viper Fish which I wish you could see. You would die laughing). Then it is back to the grind of the newspaper article.
This time I get as far as the title, which I write down with considerable satisfaction until I find that I have misspelled one word terribly, so that the whole sheet of paper has to come out and a fresh one be inserted. As I am doing this, my eye catches the basket of letters.
Now, if there is one thing that I hate to do (and there is, you may be sure) it is to write letters. But somehow, with the magazine article before me waiting to be done, I am seized with an epistolary fervor which amounts to a craving, and I slyly sneak the first of the unanswered letters out of the basket. I figure out in my mind that I will get more into the swing of writing the article if I practice a little on a few letters. This first one, anyway, I really must answer. True, it is from a friend in Antwerp asking me to look him up when I am in Europe in the summer of 1929, so he can’t actually be watching the incoming boats for an answer, but I owe something to politeness after all. So instead of putting a fresh sheet of copy-paper into the typewriter, I slip in one of my handsome bits of personal stationary and dash off a note to my friend in Antwerp. Then, being well in the letter-writing mood, I clean up the entire batch. I feel a little guilty about the article, but the pile of freshly stamped envelopes and the neat bundle of clippings on tropical fish do much to salve my conscience. Tomorrow I will do the article, and no fooling this time either.
When tomorrow comes I am up with one of the older and more sluggish larks. A fresh sheet of copy-paper in the machine, and my name and address neatly printed at the top, and all before eleven A.M.! “A human dynamo” is the name I think up for myself. I have decided to write something about snake-charming and am already more than satisfied with the title “These Snake-Charming People.” But, in order to write about snake-charming, one has to know a little about its history, and where should one go to find history but to a book? Maybe in that pile of books in the corner is one on snake-charming! Nobody could point the finger of scorn at me if I went over to those books for the avowed purpose of research work for the matter at hand. No writer could be supposed to carry all that information in his head.
So, with a perfectly clear conscience, I leave my desk for a few minutes and begin glancing over the titles of the books. Of course, it is difficult to find any book, much less one on snake-charming, in a pile which has been standing in the corner for weeks. What really is needed is for them to be on a shelf where their titles will be visible at a glance. And there is the shelf, standing beside the pile of books! It seems almost like a divine command written in the sky: “If you want to finish that article, first put up the shelf and arrange the books on it!” Nothing could be clearer or more logical.
In order to put up the shelf, the laws of physics have decreed that there must be nails, a hammer and some sort of brackets to hold it up on the wall. You can’t just wet a shelf with your tongue and stick it up. And, as there are no nails or brackets in the house (or, if there are, they are probably hidden somewhere) the next thing to do is to put on my hat and go out to buy them. Much as it disturbs me to put off the actual start of the article, I feel that I am doing only what is in the line of duty to put on my hat and go out to buy nails and brackets. And, as I put on my hat, I realize to my chagrin that I need a hair-cut badly. I can kill two birds with one stone, or at least with two, and stop in at the barber’s on the way back. I will feel all the more like writing after a turn in the fresh air. Any doctor would tell me that.
So in a few hours I return, spick and span and smelling of lilac, bearing nails, brackets, the evening papers and some crackers and peanut butter. Then it’s ho! for a quick snack and a glance through the evening papers (there might be something in them which would alter what I was going to write about snake-charming) and in no time at all the shelf is up, slightly crooked but up, and the books are arranged in a neat row in alphabetical order and all ready for almost instantaneous reference. There does not happen to be one on snake-charming among them, but there is a very interesting one containing some Hogarth prints and one which will bear even closer inspection dealing with the growth of the Motion Picture, ill
ustrated with “stills” from famous productions. A really remarkable industry, the motion-pictures. I might want to write an article on it sometime. Not today, probably, for it is six o’clock and there is still the one on snake-charming to finish up first. Tomorrow morning sharp! Yes, sir!
And so, you see, in two days I have done four of the things I had to do, simply by making believe that it was the fifth that I must do. And the next day, I fix up something else, like taking down the bookshelf and putting it somewhere else, that I have to do, and then I get the fifth one done.
The only trouble is that, at this rate, I will soon run out of things to do, and will be forced to get at that newspaper article the first thing Monday morning.
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Morale in Banking
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There has always been a slight feeling of strain in my personal relations with banks, owing doubtless to my never having had quite enough money on deposit in them. I may be hypersensitive about the matter, but I have had a suspicion that they weren’t very crazy about me for this reason. Once in a while they have even spoken to me about it, and that has just made my inferiority the worse.
But, with the beginning of the New Deal, I see no reason why we shouldn’t clear the whole horrid mess up and try to understand each other better. The banks themselves, during the past year, have known what it was to be the underdog, and possibly the experience has chastened them a little. Maybe they will realize that, when I draw out a check for just a teenty-weenty bit more than I happen to have at that moment on deposit, I am not doing it from any vicious motives but simply because I don’t subtract as well as some people, or possibly because I don’t subtract at all if I happen to be in a non-subtracting mood. That’s all it is.
Chips Off the Old Benchley Page 19