Emile Gets an In-basket

Emile St. Claire was the kind of person who relished small victories.

Not that he was happy with only small victories. He really wanted big victories. But since he’s never really had any big victories in his life he figured he would look at small victories as the stepping stones to big victories, if and when those big victories actually occurred.

That’s pretty much the attitude that has carried him through life, including his 10-year career as a certified public account for the Filbert Brothers Accounting Firm (“Come meet the Figuring Filberts” their advertising cheerfully exclaimed).

Emile had always dreamed of having his own office. Even as a kid he imagined a room where he would work and put out his own stuff. He would display bobble-heads of his favorite baseball players on the shelves, pictures of his family on his desk and framed photos of his favorite spots in the world on the wall.

As a child, Emile would go into his parents’ closet, shut the door and wait for imaginary people to come in so they could sit on the other side of his imaginary desk, compliment him on how attractive his imaginary family looked, or how nice his imaginary bobble-head collection was, or how breathtaking his imaginary photos of his favorite spots in the world were.

This would usually go on until his mother Grace opened the closet door to get her shoes or something like that.

“Mom, do you have an appointment?” he would ask.

“Emile,” she would often answer. “I don’t need an appointment to get my own shoes. You aren’t looking at Playboy magazines in there, are you?

“Mom, every office needs some magazines for people waiting for appointments.”

This went on until Emile was a junior in high school and had outgrown the closet. Still, he kept his dream alive and when he was hired at Filbert Brothers after graduating from CPA school he thought this would finally be his chance to have his own office.

The problem was that the Filbert Brothers only had a few offices, and those were for themselves and their more experienced staff. Everyone else worked in cubicles in a big room at the rear of the business.

A disappointed Emile decided to consider this a small victory. Sure, it wasn’t an office of his own, but the partitions around his desk allowed him to have a pseudo-office. He had room to put some of his stuff out, like a picture of his dog and a couple of bobble-heads.

His own office, he reasoned, couldn’t be that far down the road once he had reached cubicle status. Unfortunately, after a decade with the company, he was still in the same cubicle

Emile started to think that he might need another small victory. Something good to happen to make him feel things were moving in the right direction, even if they weren’t.

Sometimes when the Filbert Brothers or the other officeholders were out to lunch he would sneak into their offices to look around. “What can I do to make my cubicle look more like an office,” he wondered.

Then, one day as he looked around the office of the head CPA it hit him: He needed an in-basket.

Now when someone wanted to leave him some work to do, or drop off his mail, they would just set it on his desk. An in-basket, Emile figured, would be a place where all the important things he had to deal with could be in one place.

When someone stopped at his cubical to drop something off, they would put it in his in-basket and all the stuff he got during the day would accumulate in a big pile. It would look like he was a very important cog in the Filbert Brothers machine.

So Emile headed to the office manager to ask for an in-basket.

“Why do you need an in-basket?” she asked.

“So when people bring me important papers they can put them in my in-basket,” he answered.

“What do they do now?”

“They set them on my desk.”

“That seems simple enough. Why can’t they just keep doing that?”

“Why can’t they just keep doing that?” Emile said, showing his mastery of repeating the question when he couldn’t think of an answer right away (A tactic that never worked for him, by the way).

“Because I think I’ve been here long enough that I should have an in-basket in my cubicle. I think I’ve earned that right.”

“I don’t know. The only people who have in-baskets here are the important people who have their own offices.”

Emile’s frustration was growing by the second. Finally, he lashed out.

“Look, all I’ve ever wanted in my whole life was my own office. Then I came here and I didn’t get an office, I got a cubicle. Now all I want is an in-basket. Is it such a bad thing if I have an in-basket? Would it kill you or anyone else if Emile St. Claire had an in-basket sitting on the corner of his rotten little desk in his rotten little cubicle? Could you allow me to have just that one little shred of dignity?”

“OK, OK, calm down,” the office manager said. “I didn’t realize it meant so much to you.”

She handed him an in-basket.

“Thank you.” Emile was embarrassed by his outburst but happy to have his in-basket.  He turned to return to his cubicle only to hear the office manager say “wait.”

He turned around and saw her holding another basket.

“Here’s your out-basket,” she said.

“My what?”

“Your out-basket. If you’re going to have an in-basket you ought to have an out-basket, too.”

Emile hadn’t thought about having an out-basket, just an in-basket. He mulled it over for a few seconds, then shook his head back and forth.

“No thanks.”

“Why don’t you want an out-basket?” the office manager asked.

“Well, an in-basket, when it’s full it makes you look like an important person with a lot of important work to do. But if you have an out-basket and it’s empty it looks like you aren’t doing anything. I don’t think that’s a good look for me.”

What he didn’t say was he knew his production capabilities would probably result in his out-basket being empty a lot of the time. Who wanted that kind of pressure?

“So, if it’s just the same to you, I’ll just go with the in-basket,” he told the office manager.

Emile returned to his cubicle and for the rest of the afternoon he tried to decide where he should put his in-basket on his desk. You’d think this would be a simple decision, since he didn’t have the biggest desk in the world, but he wanted a location that was functional and would send the message that, “This guy has an in-basket, so he must be really important.”

He finally decided on the left-hand front corner. Then he just sat back and waited for good things to happen. Unfortunately, in the days and weeks that followed things didn’t work out as  he had expected. People bringing his mail or papers were so used to setting them on his desk that they didn’t notice the in-basket.

“In-basket, in-basket,” a frustrated Emile would say when he caught them doing that.

Eventually they got the hang of it, and Emile came to realize he didn’t get as much mail and important papers on his desk as he thought. The in-basket became a reminder that he really wasn’t an important cog in the Filbert Brothers machine.

“Here, you can have it back,” he sadly told the office manager one day as he handed her the in-basket.

“Why?” she asked.

“I guess it wasn’t the small victory I was hoping for.”

Although he was disappointed, Emile didn’t give up. He decided to start courting the daughter of one of the Filbert Brothers – a large and generally unattractive woman named Florence. After about six months he asked her to marry him.

Six months after that, Florence Filbert became Florence Filbert-St.Claire, and Emile, as a new member of the family, got the office he had dreamed of.

And he learned an important lesion – a well-placed in-basket is nice, but nothing ensures success like a well-placed father-in-law.