How would you like a fifty dollar cut in salary?
How would I -- Do I laugh now, or wait until it gets funny?
I'm serious, Walter. I've been talking to Norton. There's too much stuff piling up on my desk. Too much pressure on my nerves. I spend half the night walking up and down in my bed. I've got to have an assistant. I thought that you...
Me? Why pick on me?
Because I've got a crazy idea you might be good at the job.
That's crazy all right. I'm a salesman.
Yeah. A peddler, a glad-hander, a back-slapper. You're too good to be a salesman.
Nobody's too good to be a salesman.
Phooey. All you guys do is ring doorbells and dish out a smooth line of monkey talk. What's bothering you is that fifty buck cut, isn't it?
That'd bother anybody.
Look, Walter. The job I'm talking about takes brains and integrity. It takes more guts than there is in fifty salesman. It's the hottest job in the business.
It's still a desk job. I don't want a desk job.
A desk job. Is that all you can see in it? Just a hard chair to park your pants on from nine to five. Just a pile of papers to shuffle around, and five sharp pencils and a scratch pad to make figures on, with maybe a little doodling on the side. That's not the way I see it, Walter. To me a claims man is a surgeon, and that desk is an operating table, and those pencils are scalpels and bone chisels. And those papers are not just forms and statistics and claims for compensation. They're alive, they're packed with drama, with twisted hopes and crooked dreams. A claims man, Walter, is a doctor and a bloodhound and a cop and a judge and a jury and a father confessor, all in one...And you want to tell me you're not interested. You don't want to work with your brains. All you want to work with is your finger on a doorbell. For a few bucks more a week.
