"The clerks (an instructor for every twenty) were taught to edit the family schedules from which the count was to be made, thus learning thoroughly how to read and classify the returns. In order to accommodate the returns to the capacity of a punching machine, a great variety of symbols were adopted for occupations and professions: thus Ad was used for farmer: Ac for farm hands: Kd for merchants: Gd for agents, etc., through twenty-four two-columned octavo pages of ordinary type. Some one symbol must be used for each occupation recorded, and the use of the symbols must be learned, and, for rapid work, they must be committed to memory.[12] _After five weeks of editing_, one by one, the most reliable and intelligent workers were set to use the punching machines. The task is much like that of using a typewriter, substituting for keys a movable punch which passes through lettered holes, and in place of the forty keys of an ordinary typewriter, about two hundred and fifty holes are to be learned. "Mr. Hollerith set the number of cards for a day's work at 550. (Each finished card contained, on the average, 10 holes.) _It was two weeks before that number of cards was reached by any clerk_, and that only in exceptional cases. Then the entire force of the division was set to work. In two weeks most of them had reached five hundred, and the average was daily increasing. These clerks worked at first from edited schedules; that is, those on which had been written the symbols to be punched on the machine. A roll of honor was made out daily showing the highest records, and _in a week_ the clerks were doing from _six hundred to fifteen hundred a day_, but at a great cost of nervous force. So severe was the nervous strain that complaints were made to the Secretary of the Interior, who forbade any further posting of daily reports, and instead an order was posted that no clerk was required to do more than such a day's work as he or she could readily perform, and that no arbitrary number was required of any one.