Life — December 15, 1921 — page 22: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Scientific Management of Christmas The Babson Yuletide Montague Glass F Christmas came but twice a year or but 31,416 times a year instead of once a year, it might pay a Certified Public Accountant to open offices as a consultant to Christmas givers. Thus, if you gave your wife’s sister last Christmas a coffee percolator costing $18.50, upon the assumption that she was going to give you something in the neighborhood of $20. that being the cost of the sterling silver fruit dish with which she came across for Christmas 1919,—but if instead of giving you something worth $20.75 she responded to your 1920 model $18.50 percolator with a Japanese stencil mounted in a wooden tray with glass over it, which you happened to know didn’t stand her in a cent more than $7.25, then how the Dickens are you going to calculate the value of your 1921 Christmas to her, unless you do it with the aid of a Certified Public Accountant ? Last December 26th my wife and I sat down with pencil and paper to figure out just where we stood in the matter of presents given and received for Christmas 1920, and we discovered that we were on the wrong side of the ledger by about $28.30, with one aunt still to be heard from. It’s a matter of simple subtraction to estimate that by-employ- ing a Certified Public Accountant for a fee of $10 we would have saved $18.30. * Ok Ok ‘AKE the domestic servant aspect of Christmas presents alone, and we will say, for example, that ten per cent. of a servant’s monthly wages is a fair estimate of what she ought to receive from her employer as a Christmas present. Now suppose you hire an upstairs girl at $60 a month on the afternoox, of December 2nd at 3:35, and you hand her a Christmas present on December 25th at 8:15 A. M., off-hand how much would you give her? You don’t know.: You wouldn’t know if you covered two sheets of paper with figures. My wife used to be able to do simultaneous quad- ratic equations as easily as a fireman sliding down a polished brass pole, and once I nearly passed an examination in Conic Sections, and we don’t know. Nor would we know if instead of an upstairs girl it was a furnace man. Here, then, is a splendid oppor- tunity for a Certified Public Accountant to earn a nice piece of money every Christ- mas, and if he should have received some little training as a General Merchandise Ap- praiser, that w ouldn’t do any harm, either. “Wishing all a Merry and Efficient Christmas” “By employing a Certified Public Accountant for a fee of $10 we would have saved $18.50” mas. ET us take the hypothetical case—and not so frequently hypothetical, either of a book you have received as a Chri present from a friend,—or, at any rate, somebody you have always believed to be a friend. The jacket gives the publication price as $7.50, and in the upper left-hand corner on the reverse side of the front cover appear the letters, in lead pencil, mjs. This offers no clue to what your friend actually paid for it. It might have been sold as a publisher’: 's remainder and probably was, for it is entitled “Fifty Years of a Diplomat’s Life,” and even Sixty Years of a Diplo- mat’s Life would not be precisely a best seller. In fact, a discriminating reader like yourself would be probably fed up with three years and two months of a diplomat’s life, for with the average diplomat it is never a case of a short life and a merry one. On the contrary, this particular Diplomat’s Life is a long one—over 800 pages, and a notably tedious one. Query: How much would you spend as a return Christmas present, and for what? Christmas 1921 promises to be a difficult season for Christmas givers who go upon the theory that, if it is not better to give than to receive, it ought to be at any rate a 50-50 proposition. You see, there have been such startling reductions in the prices of articles which are generally sup- posed to be appropriate Christmas gifts. In the matter of safety razors alone, unless one is continually on the alert, one is apt to send a return present to somebody who has given you a safety razor, upon the basis of the old 1920 price of five dollars with twelve blades complete, instead of the new price of $1.99 with twelve blades complete and eight green certificates. * * x ASTLY, there is the highly intricate problem of sending a present to somebody who has sent you a tie which she has knitted herself. \s- suming that she had not stolen the silk, it then becomes necessary to compute the amount of time in- volved in the operation and the rate of compensation per hour, in addi- tion to the cost of the raw material. In a case like that, either you must put the whole affair up to a Certified Public Account- ant, or pretend you never re- ceived the rotten thing. I recom- mend the latter; and I take this opportunity of wishing all whom it may concern a Merry and Efficient Christ- comicbooks.com