INTERNAL RELATIONS. 269 



It will be observed that the use of these tables enables time to 

 be kept in very small fractions, as it scarcely gives the cost clerk 

 more trouble than if it were kept in large units, say, quarter days 

 or hours. This is often a great advantage, particularly when doing 

 many small repair jobs, the cost of which, if the time on each seems 

 too little to be counted, goes to swell unduly that of some other job. 



I believe that this will go to meet the tendency to closer time 

 reckoning, which I have reason to believe exists in workshops 

 generally. Some shops get as low in the scale of reckoning as 

 the half hour, though formerly nothing less than a day was counted. 



The tables will favor such attempts at accuracy, but with the 

 following slight disadvantages : Since the rulings of the table are 

 of appreciable thickness and of only approximate accuracy, and 

 since values intermediate between the given lines can often only 

 be estimated, and may include fractional parts of a cent, it is 

 evident that the aggregate cost of the labor charged to the several 

 shop-orders for any one day, when the amounts have been com- 

 puted by the tables, may differ from the total cost of labor for the 

 same day charged on the pay roll. Though the errors due to 

 these inaccuracies will tend to balance each other, there will 

 probably always be more or less difference between the footings. 

 The error should be corrected by altering the most probable items 

 of reported cost, instead of altering the pay roll. It would be 

 foolish to restrict one's self to a large time unit for the mere sake 

 of accuracy in an immaterial detail ; one too, which, like much of 

 the fine-spun figuring of shop accounts, is often founded on un- 

 substantial data. For example, of what good can it be to balance 

 with arithmetical exactness the cost of jobs on which no provision 

 has been made for reporting anything less than an hour's work? 



To make the tables as accurate as possible the oblique lines are 

 drawn from hour to hour for each rate instead of joining the 

 extreme points by a straight line, as one might naturally do. 



The tables described have been tried at Benicia Arsenal with 

 great success ; many men return their time by the quarter hour 

 and no trouble is found in reckoning it. When time costs, as it 

 sometimes does here, a cent a minute, it seems only right to show 

 how that time has been spent as accurately as other considerations 

 of economy will permit. 



