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Skipper Farley Cavendish is trying to focus his projector so he can show-and-tell about his new training technique that grades his ship’s teams simply as “ready to fight” or “not ready to fight.” But Commander Joe Kostik keeps interrupting him.
Scene: The flag conference room of a fleet training command.[1]
Chairman: Ladies and Gentlemen, my name is Rear Admiral Adam Brown, and it is my privilege to welcome you to this meeting.
Our purpose today is to hear from personnel of a ship who have conducted an unusual training experiment and to see what we can learn from their conclusions. I have heard some of the results of this test, and I can assure you that part of what you are about to hear may come as something of a shock. The commanding officer (CO) of this ship came to me about a year ago to explain the experiment he had in mind; he asked for a special Operational Readiness Evaluation (ORE), which we conducted. Last week, we conducted another evaluation in order to measure what changes in readiness might have taken place in the nine- month interval. More on the results of these two evaluations later.
Let me now present the ship’s captain, Commander Farley Cavendish. Just a second—is there a question in the back there?
Member of audience: I am Commander Joe Kostik, executive officer of a ship in the same battle group. This is a subject about which I feel very strongly. I’ve watched this experiment carefully for the past year or so, and I want to caution everyone here to listen with a great deal of skepticism. In my opinion, the experiment was fanciful and unlikely to be applicable to other ships and conditions. Otherwise, my mind is open.
Chairman: Thank you, Commander. Please proceed, Commander Cavendish.
Commander Cavendish: Let me introduce Midshipman Laura Petrie, who will be operating the projector.
Our incentive for undertaking this program was based on four concerns. First, the extended ranges of modem weapons have greatly increased the threat to our ships. This, together with the growing strength of our potential adversaries, creates an urgent need for excellence of performance in our fleet. Second, the rising complexity of our hardware is causing many of our ships—not just this ship—to develop Achilles’ heels, or areas that are critically vulnerable to human frailties and human errors, particularly under conditions of massive violence or extreme stress. Third, we did not see ourselves as truly expert fighting men. We believed we were good operators and could get to the fight in good shape, but we were not sure how well we could perform if our ship and crew were badly hurt. And fourth, we believe that our most pressing peacetime mission is to improve our ability to fight this ship. Five years from now, our ship should be able to demonstrate a higher level of readiness to fight than we can today, using the same equipment. Failure to improve is usually conveniently blamed on turnover. But turnover is not going to go away. The task at hand is to leam how to make progress in spite of turnover or even to use it to our advantage.
So we decided to think hard about what it might take right now to build a very high level of ability to fight. We proposed to focus on only one group or team as a prot0' type, so that the whole effort would not be too disruptive » it failed. We decided to try a repair party, because- (1) when these people are on battle stations they are often led by persons other than their regular working superv*' sors; (2) they suffer the highest turnover on board; and (3) they are often not technically skilled.
Why do we talk about training the “expert team?” We already have a personnel qualification standards (PQ^) system to help train individuals to operate and fight. The point is that there are many vital functions to be performed in battle that can be accomplished only by coordinated teams. However, we still do not have a practical way t0 give direction to, or to keep track of, the training qualifi' cations of these teams.
Our presentation will address four particular tasks: how to set team goals, how to evaluate results achieved, how t° provide feedback to team members, and how to strengthen team cohesiveness. At the end, I shall briefly discuss pr°s' pects for generalizing the lessons we’ve learned.
Now, Lieutenant Underwood Dalrymple, my damage control assistant, will take over.
Lieutenant Dalrymple: We had two purposes in setting goals for our prototype team: first, to help build motiva' tion to achieve progress, and second, to stay ready for next opportunity for on-station drill, regardless of when that might occur. We wanted these training goals to consist of functions the team should be able to perform if j were expertly trained. So the first job would be to list a the team’s “designed capabilities”—the reasons for lts existence. These we nicknamed “DesCaps.” It will not bc news to anyone here that the things an expert repair party is supposed to be able to do can be found spread around m a considerable number of books, manuals, newsletters- and whatnot. However, this fact alone made the tas worth doing. Like maintenance before the advent of th planned maintenance system (PMS), there exists today an
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| mi |
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| DESIGNED CAPABILITIES |
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| REPAIR PARTY |
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1. | Man Battle Stations |
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2. | Set Material Condition |
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3. | Fight Fires |
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4. | Clear Smoke | |
5. | Provide Emergency Interior Communications |
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6. | Control Flooding |
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7. | Provide Emergency Electric Power | sis® |
8. | Isolate and Patch Damaged Piping |
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9. | Conduct CBR Decontamination |
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10. | Extinguish Major Conflagration |
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11. | Care For Multiple Wounded |
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12. | Complete Abandoning Ship |
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13. | Conduct Rescue and Assistance |
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SLIDE 1
m
Not ready to fight
Ready to fignt
X| ISOLATE AND PATCH DAMAGED PIPING
STARTING a CONOITICN iff
SCENE . , . | EVALUATOR POSITION |
LEADER fMMMdUb | / |
TARGET OR READY DATE;
2-s- AP/l I
TEAM TRAINING QUALIFICATION CHECKLIST
Respond rapidly
Be familiar with area
Enter correctly
Test atmosphere
Use OBAs effectively & safely
Tend expertly
Report effectively
I ANALYZE
Determine extent of damage Determine required isolation or segregation.
EQUIP I
Entry tools Portable phones Auxiliary lighting Area signs and markers Writing tools
Emergency portable pumps Jumper hoses
Repair kit: cutters, wedges, plugs, hack
saws, rubber sheets, oakum or rags, ball peen, marlin
Jubilee and plastic patches
Act aggressively L
Isolate correctly Prevent over-isolation Use emergency firepumps Rig jumper hoses Split system correctly Reopen isolated valves
Set Zebra
Use tools correctly
Substitute for casualties or aosentees Coordinate closely
Lead firmly
Set and guard boundaries JSearch adjacent areas Use chain of command Keep locker and Central informed Use info from locker and Central Make use of local personnel Use correct telephone procedure—
Wear adequate battle dress
Observe safety precautions
Wear correct special clothing
Use effective triage
Use effective first aid
Move wounded carefully and correctly
I PROTECT
Exit damaged area correctly Ensure area reusable Follow out-of-control procedures Check condition of personnel Check condition of equipment IDebrief and record what happened jAnalyze and record lessons-learned (Take action to correct material deficiencies
—
_| Restore isolated sections
SLIDE 2
cab^ need to get such material out of the desks and fding ^ ets and into a form that sailors can see and use. tage6 Were able to simplify our research by taking advan- Pal W^at bad already been done by others. Our princi- A\as°Urces became the Type Commander's Repair Party \\fa' ^e Fleet Training Group evaluation forms, the cer> system, and above all, our own commanding offi- s criteria for excellence.
e result was the list of DesCaps you see in Slide 1.
This is a shopping list of possible training goals, any one of which could be selected as the team’s immediate goal. Each one of these titles would need some sort of list or description of what functions it was meant to include. For this purpose we created a single checksheet or card— somewhat like a maintenance requirements card—to list the functions comprised by each DesCap. An example is shown on Slide 2.
For many of these capabilities and functions, we
couldn’t find explicit criteria in any of the books or manuals. However, what seemed most important was to describe each designed capability in enough detail so that everyone thinking about it would be thinking about the same thing.
Questions, anyone?
Commander Kostik: I just hope this audience can visualize the stupendous workload that would be involved in digging out all the performance criteria for all the teams in every ship. What our ships need least is another mountain of mandatory paperwork. Also, this business of setting goals is beginning to sound like management by objectives, and the end result of that is likely to be more pressure on sailors than they can take.
Commander Cavendish: Thank you, Commander. Your point about the workload involved in documenting designed capabilities is especially well taken. I would now like to present my executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Thomas Myers, to talk about evaluation. Lieutenant Commander Myers: Thank you, Captain.
The central need for a system of evaluating results was to enable us to decide which goals had been achieved by the team and which had not. What we obviously had to have first was a scoring system.
There we ran into several problems. The standard Navy way of describing exercise or inspection results as unsat/ sat/good/excellent/outstanding wouldn’t do. We foresaw that too often a grade of “good” might be unsatisfactory, while the only grade corresponding with acceptable readiness to fight might be “excellent.” Also, the standard Navy’s system for describing levels of readiness as Cl, C2, C3, or C4 seemed too complicated. We decided to use only two grades: “ready to fight” and “not ready to fight.” You either are, or you aren’t.
But what should be the basis for assigning one grade or the other? As Lieutenant Dalrymple has mentioned, there is a dearth of so-called “objective” criteria for evaluating performance. Also, turnover or casualties would cause frequent changes. The solution we decided on was to depend entirely and openly on “professional judgment.” The only condition would be to keep track of whose judgment. Once a leader at any level had declared a team ready to fight, a leader at any higher level could spotcheck and verify or refute the last evaluation. When the CO himself was able to make an evaluation, his judgment would be “it.” (Our skipper, by the way, always personally evaluated the team’s capabilities for firefighting.)
Now, Master Chief Andrew Lefkowitz, the leader of the prototype repair party, will explain how all this information on DesCaps, goals, and evaluations was brought to the team level. Master Chief Lef . . . Excuse me—Commander Kostik, do you have another comment? Commander Kostik: I certainly do. Are you seriously considering a new scheme for measuring readiness? And then spreading it throughout the fleet? We already have an OpNav instruction that says the unit status and identity report (UnitRep) will be the only scheme used anywhere. Do you propose to ignore that instruction? And talk about subjective judgments! Who in the world will believe a CO
who says his own teams are all “ready to fight,” w'hen these so-called evaluations just might boost his own next fitness report? I’m surprised this audience isn’t getting UP and walking out of here.
Commander Cavendish: Just a moment here. Command1'1 Kostik, I think it’s time 1 . . .
Chairman: Captain, let’s go on with the presentation with out getting sidetracked. Commander Kostik’s comment are by no means irrelevant, even if they’re a little irreverent , and much of what he’s been saying reflects opim°nS you’re going to have to deal with later. Proceed, Capta>n- Could we have some quiet, please? f
Commander Cavendish: Aye, aye, sir. Master Chief Le kowitz, please go ahead.
Master Chief Lefkowitz: Yes, sir. .
We needed a device to keep our team members, as we as everyone else in the chain of command, informed oft e team’s progress and training goals, day by day. Somethin? everyone could see any time, and something very easy t0 keep up to date.
Slide 3 shows what we came up with. The hardwai®
consists of a metal or fiberglass frame, sometimes called pocket-rack, which we mounted in plain view on a but head just outside of the repair locker. We slipped o' checksheets or cards into the pockets with their tme showing, each one conspicuously marked to show wheth® the team is ready to fight or not ready to fight. The team overall training status was thus visible at a glance. I* capability is marked “ready to fight,” the display show* who said so and when; if “not ready,” it shows a targ® date for achievement of the team’s next training goal. T c
a combination of the ideas behind PQS and PMS. We
a team qualification system (TQS).
of office
materials. In practice, we’ve found it advisable to
victory and disaster. The well-coordinated team is
the
Cers to
remember, particularly when only one team was
jjiSPlay names the team’s leaders for each capability. It’s
‘KC H *1 : A_ i_ u:_ I nAc_ i ur.
call it
nese frames are available from commercial suppliers
ovide a hinged plastic cover and to laminate the cards to c,0tect them from the elements. If anyone is interested, I tgn Provide copies of all the checksheets for this prototype um as well as a handout explaining how to install a TQS 0n board ship.
^ Now, I return the floor to Lieutenant Dalrymple, who talk about team cohesiveness.
' shipman Petrie: Captain, may I say something? ^wander Cavendish: What is it, Miss Petrie? vv* shipman Petrie: I think Commander Kostik may be neT^ a^out a CO inflating evaluations to puff up his fit- reports. The unit commander, group commander, or y other high-level authority could come on board and check these evaluations. If the skipper’s found to be °n§ a few times, it could be fatal to his fitness reports. le“'enant Dalrymple: I think that’s very pertinent.
°w, when a combat or watch team is trained to the thin becoming a truly close-knit unit, there is some-
ng extra about it that can make all the difference between
most effective way known to cope with the destructive cts of fear and tension that always accompany extreme ence. Furthermore, the training that enables a team to funCt-°n ^esP*te casualties in battle can also help it to ne.Ctlon’ a°d indeed to improve, despite turnover in (. Ucet'me. For these reasons, the most important job for abS| team qualification system is to help strengthen the !I% °f a combat or watch team to act as a cohesive unit, bu’l re are some otber things that might be done to help c II a strong combat team, and we tried a few. Specifi- re. We thought we could give the team leader definite C()SP°nsibilities for leadership. For example, he was to 0 r'bute to performance appraisals, have a say on rec- ^tinendations for reenlistment, stand up for his team in ■ .s at captain’s mast, accompany command material
ter,fect*ons °f areas under his cognizance at general quarry/.’ anc^ occasionally assemble his team for the captain’s sonnel inspection in battle dress. These are good expe- Ces for people who aren’t work center supervisors. Tot) 0rtUnate^’ tbese ideas did n°t work out very well, many special rules were involved, too much special Perwork, too many special provisions for division offi-
■Solved.
^ Now j’m ready for questions or comments. the,\fer auchence: I am Captain Giles Northcutt from th' \Javal Education and Training Command. I’ve been in h Navy longer probably than anyone here, even Admiral wn. I want to tell you a few things about these ideas of j,rs concerning teams on board ships, in h'rSt’ we're not talking about the Army. Army squads ^ attle do need the person-to-person cohesiveness you But in a warship, the people are always together, not wbere lbe ship goes whether they’re scared or
■ And they support each other. In a ship, the whole
crew is the team, not just a group here and a group there. At least that’s been the case in all my ships.
Second, you would do well to recognize that standard shipboard organization has been built on, and proven by, long experience. Ships are still organized by divisions, and division officers are still at the heart of the system. The book says nothing about something called a “combat team.” Don’t complicate things any more for division officers by adding some new set of units or leaders that they must learn in addition to all the training and administration they already have to carry out.
Third, can you find any place in recent history of naval warfare where a battle was won or lost because of high or low morale? Of course you can’t. A demoralized army can turn and run or surrender, but a modem naval ship cannot.
No, let’s face it: warship crews are not “fighting men” as the term is commonly used. They are maintainers, operators, and administrators. Our training problems have little to do with “ability to fight.” We know our guys will do what they have to do when the time comes; they’ve proven that in three recent wars, and they continue to prove it every day all around the world. Our main problems concern keeping the equipment running and hanging on to enough good sailors to do it. What we really need to do is slow down the turnover! Once that’s done, training will take care of itself. Training is something we already know how to do probably better than any armed service in the world.
Commander Kostik: Captain Northcutt, let’s have lunch together after this thing is over.
Chairman: I think this would be a good time for a break. I will ask everyone interested in seeing this discussion through to its climax to return to this room in about 15 minutes.
Chairman: Well, 15 minutes turned into 45. I’m glad to see that just about everyone came back; in fact, there may be a few more. I think we are discussing some issues we’ve needed to examine for some time. Commander Cavendish told me during the break that the last comprehensive study of shipboard organization was done by Ernest J. King, then a lieutenant, back in 1909. Does that suggest a system “proven by experience” or does it imply stagnation? Or some of each? Let’s begin with this point. Captain?
Commander Cavendish: Thank you, Admiral.
Before discussing the lessons learned from this experiment, 1 think it is important to address three perceptive points brought out by our audience.
Point One: Captain Northcutt, you’ve said that the state of morale of a warship’s crew probably could not affect the turn of a battle at sea. Perhaps it’s true that demoralized sailors cannot turn and run. But there are other things they might do should they lack courage, determination, or spiritual strength when they can no longer see or hear through a chaos of noise, smoke, and twisted metal, or when they begin to smell the stench of burned flesh and see limbs torn from their shipmates. They might freeze in terror, or begin to shriek, or shake uncontrollably, or cower and defecate. And they might make terrible, fatal mistakes. History doesn’t describe many such events because historians have had very little access to descriptions of what goes on inside warships in battle. But the logic of the history of warfare is clear: morale is ultimately vital to victory at sea.
Point Two: A ship’s crew on a ship’s picnic can be pretty much of a big happy family. Wherever they go around the world they will go together, and at every social or athletic event—or at any more severe contest—they will typically exhibit plenty of ship spirit. In this sense, a ship’s company is, to be sure, one big team. But a ship’s crew at battle stations is divided into scores or hundreds of isolated small groups—not “work centers,” as the Navy has come to use the term, but teams of men who must depend on each other in conditions of terror and violence. Teamwork in battle calls for men who are intimately familiar not only with each other’s duties but with each other’s personal skills, strengths, and weaknesses. It calls for men who can not only stand in for each other but sense each other’s needs, understand each other’s smallest signals, lend each other courage. The nature of warfare is such that this need of men for mutual support is as true at sea as it is on the ground or in the air. The truly close-knit fighting team is potentially the warship’s strongest human resource.
Indeed, naval leaders who have not conscientiously seen the building of such teams, and who nonetheless take their ships into battle, could logically find themselves accused by the nation of trapping and sacrificing their own men in their own steel cells. When I take my ship into violence, I want my crew members to know they have been trained to help each other survive.
Point Three: Among all of the peacetime missions and tasks of every one of our ships, none is more critical than steadily improving the ability to fight. Our ships are failing in that mission. There is no hard evidence, for example, that damage control teams, engine room crews, weapons crews, ammunition handlers, or ship control teams are any more skilled today than they were ten years ago.
Captain Northcutt accuses turnover of being the main culprit. Why then do the combat capabilities of most shipboard teams tend to deteriorate during extended deployments—exactly when turnover is reduced? The very concept of “refresher training” is an admission that self-training of combat teams today is not working.
Now for some concrete results of our experiment. First, the data from the two OREs.
Let me set the picture. This ship has seven repair parties. The training command evaluators looked at all seven both before and after the nine-month test period. They did not know that any sort of experiment was involved. After each ORE, we sat down with the evaluators and rated each team on each of our 13 DesCaps using a scale of 0 to 100. Then we averaged the 13 DesCap ratings to obtain an overall state-of-training score for each team. Slide 4 compares these scores for the two OREs. Note that the state- of-training scores for six teams tended slightly downward over the nine-month period, while the score for the prototype or TQS team rose about 13 percentage points. It’s true that this was only one test; nevertheless, the results
seem encouraging. Personnel turnover, by the way, waS about 40% for all teams. .
From the foregoing data and from careful observati°n during the test period, we drew conclusions about effeC tiveness of training, about extending the system to othe teams, and about effects on morale and motivation. In \ . first place, TQS works! This is not too surprising. S°c'a science research has been lending increasing credibility10 the notion that setting goals and providing feedback 0IJ results tend to improve group performance. The critic feature we injected here was simply an effective devicet0 make goals and knowledge of results continuously visib,ej
In the second place, however, we shall probably 1 extremely difficult to extend the TQS idea throughout ou ship. We would face the following difficulties: ,
► As Captain Northcutt pertinently observed, the stand31 organization does not subdivide a ship’s company combat teams, nor does it provide a chain of responsible j for improving overall ability to fight. If I establish an u^ conventional organization shipwide for these purposes, will undoubtedly vanish a few months after I move on-^ is it even worth trying?
► We do not have the resources to purchase or manufuture TQS frames, nor does the design of our ship pr°vl L enough places, properly lighted, to mount them.
► Commander Kostik mentioned that assembling nf signed capabilities for every combat team would be 3 job. True. But how can any CO conscientiously fulfil* h leadership responsibilities without defining perform311 , criteria for his people? If there is to be any real hope ° setting training goals by understanding capabilities to achieved, of evaluating progress, or of making progresS’ the first job to be done is to decide what people are bed1? asked to become good at. This is what PQS does for tyP1 cal individual stations. The same could be done for typ'ca
(er questions, so I’ll close the meeting now, and thank
§oal
j coming.
Would like to leave you with just one observation. Our
-j?s without loading the task on individual ships. e most important thing we learned from this experi- bers1 'f one * can Put 'n fewest words. The mem- confa °Ur PrototyPe team developed a sense of purpose, e n enC.e’ worth> ancl togetherness that I have never seen time 'n an^ ot^er shipboard group. And for the first day6 US ^new the state of training of that team every
me^hat I intend to do now, despite the obstacles I’ve tea 10ned’ ’s try to move ahead steadily and extend the fge^i^^'i'cation system with whatever help I can get. I giv "at * am Plnaily getting at the real reason why I was this command—in fact, the real reason why my ship ** bailt in the first place.
for i•1S concludes our presentation. Thank you sincerely
st lstening. We hope that our effort to find better ways to
ate ,^taen shipboard team training will ultimately contrib-
CVia'° com^at effectiveness of the Navy.
d[&u,rtnan: Ancl our thanks to you, Commander Caven-
int ^°U and y°ur people have performed like a truly
fi,„^ratecl team. Ladies and gentlemen, there isn’t time for uirttier c
you f0r ln combat training is excellent performance backed up by superior stamina under violent conditions. We have not reached that goal. I must agree that we shall not get there until our ships possess the capacity to improve themselves.
The critical question before us is whether they have that capacity now.
King, Earnest J. “Some Ideas About Organization On Board Ship.” Proceedings, March 1909, pp. 1—35.
Wesbrook, S. D. “The Potential for Military Disintegration.” S. C. Sarkesian (ed.), Combat Effectiveness. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1980.
Zander, A. Making Groups Effective. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1982. See esp. Chapter9, “Strengthening Desire for Group Success.”
Captain Appleton is a graduate of the Naval Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, the Armed Forces Staff College, and the Naval War College. He holds a master’s degree in information systems management and a doctorate in administrative management from the University of California. He has served in battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and amphibious force ships and has held four sea commands.
Education and Training Minicontest
The ASW Display
As the battle group’s fleet exercise was ending, the antisubmarine warfare (ASW) commander and the submarine element coordinator, who had been working together on board the aircraft carrier, were asked to describe the display they had used to keep track of their ASW resources and direct the actions. Their response was:
A man-computer-sensor interface: An alfa numeric display in multimedia of raw data of widely diverse quality on a geographic orientation of multiple nonrelated, remotely located sensors of nonintegrable capabilities which functions in nonreal time to aggregate and correlate data inputs of electronic, audio, and visual phenomena to allow analysis and analytical reflection by human operatives, thereby allowing viable evaluation and accommodating in-depth resolution of nonrepeated subsets of discrete incidents into unified and substantive hypothesis, serving as both an information bank and a central repository of historically significant events, promoting accurate and timely dissemination of information and instruction to variously capable and distantly located units, thereby substantially enhancing the efficiency of asset allocation, increasing effectiveness of resource assignment for localization about meaningful data points, optimizing prosecution of final decision regardless of the originator of primary data, and accommodating the random quality and discontinuous nature of the assorted sources.
As they had so accurately described it, the ASW display was a paper marked with colored pencils.
Captain Stu Landersman, U. S. Navy (Retired)
Quick-Change Bagger
At the commissary a few weeks ago, my wife and I had returned to our car in the parking lot when my wife suddenly realized she was no longer carrying her purse. “I must have left it at the checkout,” she exclaimed, and we started to go back inside.
At the door, one of the baggers, a small, freckle-faced boy about 12, was triumphantly holding up my wife’s purse. “Are you the guys that lost this?” he asked.
“Yes,” my wife answered. “Thank you.” She opened her purse. “Why, there was a $10 bill in here. Now there are ten ones.”
“I know,” the boy answered with a grin, “but the last time this happened to me, the lady didn’t have any change.”
David P. Grady
[1]This is a transcript of remarks made at a conference that was never held. Any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.