Anybody Can Do Anything by Betty MacDonald Page B

fact that, although everyone in the class, and there were forty-two of them, was an expert typist and shorthand dynamo, I was the only one with a job. When I told Mary, she said, “Naturally. I told you you wouldn’t find any executives at nightschool.”
    I never did get to feel like an executive and I never did conquer my obsession that there was a mysterious key to office work which, like holding a letter written in lemon juice over a candle, would one day be revealed to me all at once; but by the end of June I had stopped getting tears in my eyes when Mr. Webster called me for dictation; the letters I typed had fewer, smaller holes in them, I occasionally got the right side of the carbon paper so the copy was on onion skin instead of inside out on the back of the original letter; I could sometimes find things in the files and I had almost finished the maps.
    The maps and the files were the worst things I did to dear, kind Mr. Webster. I never was able to figure out the filing system; why letters were sometimes filed by the name of the man who wrote them, sometimes by the name of a mine, sometimes in a little black folder marked Urgent and sometimes in a drawer marked Hold.
    Of course, if I’d stopped batting around the office like a moth around a nightlight, had read the correspondence and asked a few intelligent questions, I might have learned the secret of the filing system, but I didn’t. I operated on the theory that always hurrying wildly, never asking questionsand shutting up Mr. Webster with “I know, I know,” any time he tried to volunteer any information, were proof of great efficiency on my part. Because of this unfortunate state of affairs, Mr. Webster is still looking for things.
    I’d pick up a letter, notice that the letterhead was Fulton Mining Company or that it was signed by a man named Thompson, so eeny, meeny, miney, mo—it would go either in F or T. Then Mr. Webster would ask for that letter on the Beede Mine and I would look under B, under Urgent, under Hold, under M, under my desk, under his, and finally days later, quite by accident, would find it under T or F because the Fulton Mining letter, written by Thompson, was about the Beede Mine.
    It is hard now, for me to believe that I was that stupid, but I was, and it was easy for me. Take the matter of the maps.
    One rainy, dull morning, when Mr. Webster was away on a short trip and I was flitting around the office, I happened to bump into the map case. Now there was a messy thing. Thousands of maps all rolled sloppily and stuffed in the case every which way.
    “How does poor dear Mr. Webster ever find anything?” I said, opening the glass door and settling myself for a good thorough cleaning job. Now, a mining engineer’s maps, like an architect’s drawings or a surgeon’s living patients, are the visual proof that he did graduate from college, has examined the property and does know what he is doing.
    “Here is the ore deposit,” Mr. Webster would say, spreading out his maps and indicating little specks. “By tunneling through this mountain, changing the course of this river, bringing a railroad in here and putting a smelter here . . .”
    So, I unrolled all the maps, cleaned the smudges off them with an artgum eraser, and rolled them all up again, each one separately and each one with an elastic band around it. Then I sorted them according to size, the littlest ones on thetop shelf, the medium-sized ones on the next shelf, the biggest one on the bottom. I was very tired and dirty when I finished but I glowed with accomplishment.
    That night at dinner I told Mary about my wonderful progress at Mr. Webster’s; how I took dictation, found things in the files and had even sorted his maps. Mary said, “I told you mining was easy.”
    Then Mr. Webster returned from his trip, accompanied by an important man from Johannesburg, South Africa, and for the first time since I had been working there, asked me to find him some maps. “Get me