Life — January 6, 1921 — page 13: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This satirical comic strip by Gluyas Williams depicts the frustrations of a businessman dealing with bureaucratic red tape and corporate inefficiency. The sequence shows: - A man attempting to conduct business but becoming increasingly exasperated by procedural obstacles - Multiple officials creating barriers and requiring endless documentation - Piles of paperwork accumulating as obstacles to simple transactions - The final panel shows him resorting to physical labor ("Left 'em dig!"), suggesting that manual work is preferable to navigating institutional complexity The cartoon satirizes early-to-mid 20th-century American corporate and governmental bureaucracy—the proliferation of rules, forms, and intermediaries that made simple business dealings unnecessarily complicated. Williams' humor emphasizes how absurd these systems had become, forcing practical people toward frustration or alternatives.