Judge — November 3, 1917 — page 8: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This single-panel cartoon satirizes the anxiety of asking one's boss for a raise. The clerk (shown repeatedly via dashed lines tracing his movements) nervously circles through an office building, repeatedly psyching himself up and backing down from entering the boss's office. Speech bubbles show his internal debate: he receives a letter dated the 9th spurring him to ask, but then postpones ("I'll let it go 'til to-morrow"). The cartoon depicts his boss visible in an upper office window. The humor targets the common workplace fear and procrastination around salary negotiations—the clerk's indecision and endless circling visualize his mental hesitation. This reflects early 20th-century office culture anxieties about hierarchy and the difficulty of directly confronting authority figures about compensation.