THE "OBLIGERS"

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 146, 9 March 1918, Page 7

THE "OBLIGERS"

GROWTH OF 1 SLACK CLASS.

A business man recently wrote to the "Daily Mail" with rcienpce to the slackness and inefficiency of inauy. untrained employees in offices and shops: "Before the war there was a class of women whom housewives temporarily engaged when servantless. They were professionally known as supplies. The chief commodity they supplied was trouble; Tlio 'supplies'' worked so wonderfully their first week in a house that the mistress (if young and callow in the ways of 'supplies') wrote to her friends that she had found a supremo treasure. The second week ; the treasure slowed down and showed signs of resentment. The third week she usu;..~ ly left. Arid all 'supplies' had one stock parting reminder to their employer. It was 'I only came to oblige.' "That is the belief of many wartime employees. They aro thero to 'oblige.' The 'obligors' are everywhere. When the girl railway booking clerk first appeared wo thought her smile and alacrity an improvement on the man booking clerk's occasional moroscness, and so it was until a large number of girl booking clerks decided that they were there only to 'oblige.' Tho new type of shop assistant is plainly only there to 'oblige,' and so is the duchess of the teashop. The list of 'obligers,' men as well as women, can be extended indefinitely, but unless thoy improve when the boys come home again they will perhaps cease to work 'only to oblige.' " As for the war-time office hoy, a correspondent of the "Daily Mail" says: ."Humpty-dumpty's fall from his wall was nothing compared with the fall that\hc 'too-big-for-his-boots boy' employee is going to' have after the war."