Judge, 1915-03-13 · page 7 of 24
Judge — March 13, 1915 — page 7: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This satirical piece mocks a universal office annoyance: the colleague who perpetually leaves doors open, letting in cold drafts and undoing efforts to heat the workspace. The narrator, an office worker struggling against arctic winds from Greenland, finally gets warm by burning coal, only to have an inconsiderate coworker repeatedly burst in without closing the door behind him. The humor escalates through the narrator's catalog of different "bores"—the joke-teller, the autograph-seeker, the insurance-scare-monger, the motor-car-bore, the war-map expert. Yet all pale beside this "freak, the man who never shuts the door," making him the supreme annoyance. The cartoons depicting "trench diggers" visually reinforce the exhausting, futile labor of repeatedly reheating the office. This targets middle-class office culture's petty frustrations and the one inconsiderate person who wastes everyone's time and resources.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
HE WIND blows cold from Greenland’s hills, where it has long been kept on my poor old ageworn frame it chills and makes me cuss things once or twice. I sit and shiver at my desk and read the duns that came by mail and say, ‘‘That zephyr pic- turesque would freeze the whiskers off a whale."’ “At last I get the office warm, by burning up a ton of coal; then comfort permeates my form, and peace descends upon my soul. And then I drop into a doze, and as some soulful tunes I snore, into my warm retreat there blows the man who never shuts the door, I sit up in my chair, aghast, and cry, ‘‘Alas!’’ and then, “‘Alack!"" for fourteen miles of arctic blast are blowing things to Troy and back. He leaves the portal open wide, that breezy skate, that bore accursed, and all the warmth that was inside is blown outdoors and there dispersed. And there he stands, that beaming jay, that moral wreck, that total loss, and wears a smile that seems to say, ‘‘I am the long-lost Charlie Ross!"" And still he wears his cheerful grin, as I rear up and roundly roar, ‘‘You blamed slab-sided son of sin, why don’t you shut the dratted door?’"’ It takes another ton of coal to make the office warm again, and I'm already in the hole, from bringing slate into my den. It takes a half a day to find the papers that were blown away, and when that's done, my state of mind is brindle colored, streaked with gray. I've caught pneumonia and the grip, bronchitis and old Bright's disease, and I will have to take a trip and convalesce by southern seas. My rheumatism makes me sigh, and my lumbago makes me roar, and all because a grinning guy came in and failed to shut the door, 1 know all kinds of bores there are, I know them all, and one by one; they come to me from near and far, to tell me jokes and borrow mon. I know the sunshine bore who laughs and jollies one with cheerful spiels; the bore who's after autographs, until the victim's blood congeals. I know the bores with tearful talks about the future of our wives, who scare us into blowing rocks in order to insure our lives. I know the bore with mouth ajar and tireless lungs and voice askew, who talks about his motor car as though no other ever grew. 1 know the bore who lived in France and knows just where those armies scrap, and every skirmi-h and advance he wants to show upon the map. I know the bore who is unique, I know the common garden bore; they all seem cheap beside that freak, the man who never shuts the door. There are many speed obstructions in the road to success. ail comicbooks.com