some customer of
his, and you're going to put your hand on your college diploma so as to
have it handy, and you're going to hand him the letter and prepare to
tell the story of your strong young life. But just before you begin
you'll go away, because the manager will tell you he's sorry, but he's
busy, and there are fourteen applicants ahead of you, and anyway he'll
not be hiring any more men until 1918, and will you please come around
then, and shut the door behind you, if you don't mind.

Yep, that's what will happen to you. You'll spend your first three days
trying to haul that diploma out. The fourth day you'll put it in your
trunk. I've known men to cut 'em up for shaving paper. You'll stop
trying to tell the story of your life and in about a week you'll be
wondering why you have been allowed to live so long. In two weeks a
clerk will look as big as a senator to you and you'll begin to get
bashful before elevator men. You'll get off the sidewalk when you see a
man who looks as if he had a job and was in a hurry. You'll envy a
messenger boy with a job and a future; you'll wonder if managers are
really carnivorous or only pretend to be. You feel as tall as the Singer
Building to-day, but you'll shrink before long. You'll shrink until,
after a long, hard day, with about nine turndowns in it, you'll have to
climb up on top of the dresser to look at yourself in the glass.

That's what you're going up against. Then the Siwash Club will be your
hole and you'll hunt it every evening. You'll be a big man there, for we
judge our members not by what they are, but by what they were at school.
You'll sit around with the boys after dinner, and the man on your right,
who is running a railroad, will be interested in that home run you made
against Muggledorfer, and the man on your left, who won't touch a law
case for less than five thousand dollars, will tell you that he, too,
won the Perkins debate once. And he'll treat you as if you were a real
life-sized human being instead of a job hunter, knee high to a copying
clerk. You'll be back in the old college atmosphere, as big as the best
of 'em, and after you've swapped yarns all evening you'll go to bed full
of tabasco and pepper and you'll tackle the first manager the next
morning as if he were a Kiowa man and had the ball. And sooner or later
you'll get old Mr. Opportunity where he can't give you the straight arm,
and if you don't put a knee in his chest and tame him for life yo