Read Online Anybody Can Do Anything by Betty MacDonald - Free Book Online

those maps on the Connor mine,” he said and I jogged happily over to the map case but when I got there I realized that with my new filing system, it wasn’t the name of the map that counted but the size.
    I called to Mr. Webster, “What size is the Conner map?”
    He answered rather testily, “What do you mean, ‘what size’? It’s that big bundle near the front on the bottom shelf.”
    My spirits fell with a thud that rattled the glass doors of the map case as I suddenly realized that the big bundle near the front on the bottom shelf was now about twenty-five bundles on all the shelves. So Mr. Webster, who had heretofore always filed the maps and knew exactly where each one had been, the man from Johannesburg and I spent the rest of the day on the floor by the map case unrolling maps. We had found most of the Conner mine by eight-thirty and I was released.
    The next morning there was a note on my desk. “Betty: Have gone to Denver, will be back Monday—please return maps to their original confusion—Webster.” Before I finished, however, the home office closed the Seattle office and mining was over.

4: “So Is Lumber”
     
    “You thought you couldn’t learn mining,” Mary told me when she installed me as her assistant in the office across the street. “There’s nothing to lumber, it’s just a matter of being able to divide everything by twelve.”
    “What about Mr. Chalmers?” I asked. “Does he know you’ve hired me?”
    “He knows that I’ve hired an extremely intelligent young lady who has spent the last four years practically living in logging camps in the greatest stand of timber in the United States and anyway what’s it to him? You’re my assistant. Go sharpen this pencil.”
    I was worried. I hadn’t yet met Mr. Chalmers and, though I knew that he didn’t want to be bothered with details, I had no assurance that he would consider Mary’s new assistant at $125 a month, a detail; especially when he learned that in Seattle most female office workers were paid from seven to twenty dollars a week and $125 a month was considered a man’s salary, except in a few rare instances where a woman with years of experience showed terrific and unusual efficiency.
    I was quite sure that as soon as Mr. Chalmers found out about me he would fire me, but what worried me more was a fear that he would also fire Mary for having hired me. Ofcourse, I was reckoning without Mary or Mr. Chalmers. Mr. Chalmers was not a figment of Mary’s imagination, requiring Joe Doner to prove him, but was a real, unique individual whose sole aim actually was to be the biggest-time executive that had ever hit Seattle, no matter what it cost the lumbermen, and in Mary he had certainly chosen the right person to help him.
    About ten-thirty Mr. Chalmers made his entrance into, or rather descent upon, the office. The door to the outer office crashed open and banged shut; the door to the conference room crashed open and banged shut; the door to his private office crashed open and banged shut; then the buzzer on Mary’s desk began to buzz with short angry bursts like a bee in a tin can. I flinched nervously at each slamming door and jumped to my feet at the first ring of the buzzer.
    Mary, who was checking some lumber reports, didn’t even look up. The angry buzzing continued. Finally, anxiously I asked, “Do you want me to see what he wants?” Mary said, “I already know what the old stinker wants. He wants somebody to yell at because he is nasty in the morning. Come on, let’s get a cup of coffee. He’ll be pleasanter when we get back.”
    She picked up the phone, pressed a bell at the side of the desk and said, “Mr. Chalmers, I’m going out for coffee, will you please take any calls?” There was a roar from the inner office and the phone sputtered like water on a hot stove, but Mary put it back on the hook, beckoned to me and we skittered out of the office and down the stairs to the next floor to wait for the elevator.