Sixty Dollars, Cash, Same Day
Paid at a window, out of a tin, by a man whose entire job is that window and that tin. No cheque, no waiting, no accounts department, no form beyond the one you have already signed. Accounting has proposed a cheque four times and has been told no four times.
A man who has spent an afternoon being flung across a room by a plate should not then be asked to wait a fortnight for a cheque to clear. That is the whole of the policy. Everything else on this sheet is Accounting explaining the policy at greater length than the policy requires.
Sixty dollars is roughly a week’s wage on the iron range, for one afternoon, and I set it at sixty in 1954 because sixty is a number a man can picture. Accounting has recommended forty on three occasions and once had it printed as forty on the front page of this very publication before I caught it. It is sixty. It has always been sixty. It will be sixty.
The Schedule
Rates of compensation, Enrichment Center volunteer testing programme
| Category | Description | Rate | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| I | Standard afternoon, one to eight chambers | $60.00 | The ordinary engagement |
| II | Extended afternoon, nine chambers or more | $75.00 | By the volunteer’s request only |
| III | Gel exposure, any quantity | $60.00 + $5.00 | The five is for the laundry |
| IV | Emancipation grill, repeat traversal | $60.00 + $12.00 | See the dental plan |
| V | Aperture transit, recorded | $60.00 + $15.00 | Most requested |
| VI | Overnight observation, voluntary | $110.00 | Bed, board, and a lamp |
| VII | Substrate handling | $140.00 | Mask supplied. Mask compulsory. |
| VIII | Duration trial, seven days | $400.00 | Four have been run |
| IX | Chambers of the ninth category | $1,000.00 | Never claimed. |
Rates are per volunteer, per engagement, paid in United States currency at the gate house window on ascent. The ninth category has appeared on this schedule since the second printing and Accounting has been unable to establish who added it.
The Eleven Conditions
Legal requires that the Enrichment Center publish the circumstances in which it would decline to compensate a volunteer. The Enrichment Center publishes them below and notes, with some satisfaction, that not one of the eleven has ever been invoked in five years of the programme.
Conditions Under Which Compensation May Be Withheld
- The volunteer did not present at the gate house.
- The volunteer presented under a name that is not his.
- The volunteer declined to descend, having signed. (He is paid anyway. See below.)
- The volunteer removed apparatus from a chamber.
- The volunteer removed apparatus from a chamber by swallowing it.
- The volunteer was found to be an employee of a competing research facility.
- The volunteer was found to be an employee of this company.
- The engagement was interrupted by an act of God, the State of Michigan, or the reactor.
- The volunteer’s afternoon was not, in the judgement of Operations, an afternoon.
- The tin was empty. (This has occurred once. The man was paid from the President’s pocket.)
- The volunteer ascended, and Operations is satisfied that he did not descend.
Condition three is on the list because Legal insisted it be on the list. The Enrichment Center has paid every man who signed and then thought better of it, all two thousand eight hundred and one of them, and will go on doing so, because a man who reads the form and changes his mind has given us the single most useful afternoon of anybody.
“It is sixty dollars and it is cash and it is the same day. Write it down so I stop having to say it.”
Interoffice Memorandum
A cheque is a promise. A promise is a thing a company makes when it does not have the money in the building. We have the money in the building. It is in a tin.
I understand the accounting is untidy and I understand you have said so four times and I want you to know that I have read all four and that the answer is the same one. When a man comes up out of that shaft he is going to be handed sixty dollars by a person, in his hand, while he is standing there. That is not an accounting decision.
Cave JohnsonPresident & Founder
When The Volunteer Is Not There To Be Paid
It has happened eleven times. On each of those eleven occasions the sixty dollars was made up into a registered packet and posted to the address on the volunteer’s form within the same week, in cash, over the objection of the United States Post Office, which has written to us twice about it.
- Packets posted
- Eleven
- Signed for
- Seven
- Returned undelivered
- Three
- Neither signed for nor returned
- One.
- Post Office letters received
- Two
- Post Office letters answered
- Two. Identically.
Present At The Window On Ascent
Good For Sixty Dollars.
No endorsement. No identification. No questions. The man at the window has held that job since 1954 and has never asked anybody anything.
There is no ninth category. I have been through every schedule, every drawing and every day book in this building. The line is in the ledger and the chamber is not in the shaft. — C.
Form ASI-306. Compensation is governed by Form ASI-900, clause I, which states that compensation is payable upon completion of the afternoon and does not require the volunteer’s presence at the conclusion — a sentence Legal drafted, the President struck, Legal restored, and which has been printed in every edition since.