Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 May 1884 — A Troublesome Individual. [ARTICLE]

A Troublesome Individual.

The employe who is afraid of doing too much is not the sort of man who ever becomes very valuable to his employer or to himself. His aim seems to be to do just enough to save him from censure or dismissal. He saunters instead of walking; he does everything with a sort of lackadaisical air, as if he were performing a great act of condescension in waiting upon you at all; he says y-e-s and n-o as if every letter cost a dollar, and they were the last he had; he gazes out of the door, away off yonder, while you ask him a question, and then tortures you with y-e-s or n-o; he never condescends to correct your mistakes, if you make one; or, if he does, it is with the tone of one vastly superior to your humble and unworthy self, and excites in you a determination to have as little to do with him as possible; he makes all his preparations for departure before the hour, so that not a minute of his own time is lost; he does as he is told, but no more; he never thinks of how he can advance his employer’s interests, in some unbidden way, and has not brains enough to know that when cultivating the habit of thought of the business of his employer he is laying up capital and strengthening his own resources for the time when he shall start a businest of his own. There are many such clerks aa this, but may their tribe diminish.