y was not a
crabbed nervous wreck from having to work on top of everyone else. It
was almost like attempting dressmaking in the Subway. The boss at
times would gaze upon my own frantic efforts, and he claimed: "Every
time I look at you the tears come in my eis." And I would tell him,
"Every time I think about myself the tears come in mine." About every
other day he appeared with a hammer and some nails and would pound
something some place, with the assurance that his every effort spelled
industrial progress and especial help to me.

"All I think on is your comfort, yes?"

"Don't get gray over it!"

Nor will I forget that exhibition of the boss's ideas of scientific
management. Nothing in the factory was ever where anyone could find
it. It almost drove me crazy. What was my joy then when one day the
boss told me to put the spools in order. There was a mess of
every-colored spool, mixed with every other color, tangled ends, dust,
buttons, loose snappers, more dust, beads, more spools, more dust. A
certain color was wanted by a stitcher. There was nothing to do but
paw. The spool, like as not, would be so dusty it would take blowings
and wipings on your skirt before it could be discovered whether the
color was blue or black. I tied my head in tissue paper and sat down
to the dusty job of sorting those spools. Laboriously I got all the
blacks together and in one box. Laboriously all the whites. That
exhausted all the boxes I could lay hands on. I hunted up the boss. "I
can't do that spool job decent if I ain't got no boxes to put the
different colors in."

"Boxes, boxes! What for you want boxes?"

"For the spools."

"'Ain't you got no boxes?"

"'Ain't got another one."

He hustled around to the spool shelves where I was working.

"_Ach_, boxes! Here are two boxes. What more you want?"

Majestically, energetically, he dumped my black spools out of one box,
my white spools out of the other--dumped them back with a flourish
into the mess of unassorted dust and colors.

"Here are two boxes! What more you want?"

What redress had I for such a grievance except to wail at him: "My
Gawd! my Gawd! I jus' put those spools in them boxes!"

"_Ach_, so!" says the boss. "Vell, put um back in again."

With the sweat of my life's blood I unearthed a ragged empty box here,
another there, no two sizes the same. After three days of using every
minute to be spared from other jobs on those shelves, I had every
single spool wh