Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 245, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 October 1911 — MEN THAT WASTE YOUR TIME [ARTICLE]

MEN THAT WASTE YOUR TIME

ETZ. V" i - - . Writer Sets Down Certain Class, and With Much Truth, as Being Merely Loafers. To a heap of people, maybe the big majority, life is just loafing along, Frites Tip in the New York Press. There’s the fellow who sits smoking on a porch or stoop and throws a dozen or so matches upon the lawn or into the yard. It would be just as easy, and a million times as decent, for him to put them in an ash receiver—too much trouble to get one—or lay them in a little pile beside him to be disposed of afterward. But it takes somebody a quarter of an hour to go and gather up the half burned sticks that he has scattered everywhere. He prides himself, perhaps, upon not being finicky; would be mad as a hornet to be told he was just a loafer. There’s the fellow who sticks a fine steel blade Into add fruit, spoiling the fruit and the knife, not even bothering to wipe the blade. It takes a second to do the damage; ft would take forever to undo it There’s the fellow who goes and finds a screwdriver in its proper place to tighten up a window hasp, say, and, after tightening it so that it will not work at all, puts the screwdriver down anywhere, so that the one who must untighten the hasp has to hunt for hours all over the house for the screwdriver.' The fellow has no doubt he was being useful; he was being a ding-goned nuisance; wasting other people’s valuable time. There’s the fellow who knows that it’s about time tor an axle to need oil or grease, but tomorrow will do, when it’s handy; so the hot box that comes along before then puts the thing out of commission and costs dollars to get in shape again. He thinks he was in .hard luck that ft wouldn’t run long enough for him to find the lubricant without any trouble; he was just a good-for-nothing. There’s the fellow who burns a cigar when he needs it, and goes off leaving it burning just the same when he doesn’t need it. He’s very likely to plume himself on *not being pennywise; he has the responsibility and sense of a Digger Injun. There are 10,000 ways in which that sort loafs along through life, cock-sure they are useful human beings, but mostly leaving wreck and ruin in their wake. From the start they have no chance for success; at the finish they are ghastly failures. And every mother’s son of them takes his oath, at any stage of the game, that he is' being passed by somebody all the time merely because the other is smiled upon by fortune and pampered by favoritism.