The Typing Instructor
from Unseen Character
(A neatly dressed woman appears in front of the typewriter keyboard chart and a Gregg shorthand diagram.)
Wingfield? Is that what you said? Wingfield? Wingfield . . . we don’t have any such student enrolled here at Rubicam’s Business College. Not with the name of Wingfield.
I know every girl’s name that graduates from Rubicam. I know their names and their faces. I pride myself at Rubicam for knowing not only the faces and names of our girls, but also their personal strengths and their individual weaknesses. It is a highly specialized skill and important consideration that we pride ourselves at Rubicam to understand a secretary’s weaknesses or shortcomings. We can choose to concentrate on turning that weakness into a strength. Or sometimes, we must learn to camouflage it by way of highlighting the other strengths the girl might most probably possess. Show a potential employer that this one bright strength of a girl’s is so monumentally vibrant that there is no other choice but to be blinded into hiring her services. It’s a little trick here at Rubicam that I like to call blind submission. Isn’t that fanciful? Little magical? Blind submission. It might sound literary or even sensual in device or nature, but I mean for it to be solely a tactic for the unemployed to become suddenly employed.
Wingfield is a name that I most definitely think that I’d remember. Now I wonder if you could be talking about a very timid girl. She came for a few days, but after just a few days, she vanished. Disappeared. Poof! Like a ghost or a mirage or a magician’s assistant, rabbit, dove, what have you.
No, I remember her perfectly now. Her hands shook so that she couldn’t hit the right keys! The first time we gave a speed test, she broke down completely—was sick to her stomach and had to be carried into the washroom! After that morning she never showed up anymore. We phoned the house but never got any answer.
One day, I went downtown for a seminar for business colleges around the county, and I do believe I saw her at the picture show. I remember driving by, thinking that girl went to Rubicam for a very short while. I meant to re-investigate the mystery, but it seems to me that the mystery’s just been solved. She did not have the makings for secretarial merit. I think she focused more on her physical limitations, rather than her physical potentialities. I don’t think that’s a very uncommon thing to do. But I do find it harmful to both the body and the mind. The spirit shall survive, but it’s a damaged one, nonetheless.
The future is such a wide and unsure territory that I think it not only gets the best of us, but it robs us of the present situation. We worry about the future so much, we lose the present tense. And when the future arrives, it should be our present, but it only quickly becomes our past.
There is a fragility in every person’s character. Don’t you think? Whether seen or unseen, a fragile character resides somewhere in each of us. We are all physical containers and spiritual parcel posts. We should walk around the streets of unknown territory and stamp “Fragile” on our foreheads if the fragility is not so apparent. 
Contributor’s
notes
Unseen Character Suite: Introduction and Menu