Figaro's Recruitment by the Timesaving Bank is the encounter in which a member of the Men in Gray persuades Mr Figaro, a neighborhood barber, to treat his life as a fund of seconds that can be saved. The recruitment turns an ordinary shop and its routines into an instrument of time discipline: Mr Figaro cuts his work and relationships to measurable essentials, yet the promised reserve of time never becomes available to him.

The Barber and the Promise of Another Life

The encounter begins with Mr Figaro alone outside his small barbershop in the town center. He is a respected local tradesman, neither rich nor poor, and employs an apprentice, who is away that day. But Mr Figaro feels that the work of cutting hair, lathering faces, and talking with customers leaves him no room for a more distinguished or affluent life. He has no clear picture of what that life would entail; glossy magazines provide a vague image of it, while his immediate frustration is that his days are occupied by the shop.

The Men in Gray understand that dissatisfaction as an opening. The narrative describes them as experts in time’s value who have secretly established themselves in the city and carefully identify people likely to advance their plans. Mr Figaro is one such prospect. The visitor arrives in a smart gray limousine, dressed in gray and carrying a briefcase and notebook. His appearance makes the recruitment feel less like a casual conversation than an organized approach, though Mr Figaro does not recognize its purpose.

The agent echoes Mr Figaro’s own complaint back to him: that work consumes his life and leaves him no time for the life he wants. This agreement helps make the proposal appear to answer a need Mr Figaro has already identified. The visitor presents saving time not as a change imposed from outside, but as a way for Mr Figaro to become the person he imagines he might otherwise have been.

Turning a Lifetime into an Account

The agent’s central technique is arithmetic. He asks Mr Figaro to consider how long he may live, settles on seventy years as a cautious estimate, and calculates a total of 2,207,520,000 seconds. He writes the figure in large numerals on the shop mirror and underlines it. The sum gives Mr Figaro a new sense of his life’s size and value, but frames that value as capital to be managed rather than time already being lived.

The calculation is followed by examples of supposed missed savings. Saving one hour a day for twenty years, the agent says, would amount to 26,280,000 seconds; saving two hours a day would double that balance. He extends the argument to forty years, claiming that saving a couple of hours daily would accumulate more than ten times Mr Figaro’s entire lifespan. The scale of the figures overwhelms him. He accepts the reasoning before examining what the proposed savings would require him to give up.

The agent supplies a practical program. Mr Figaro should reduce each customer’s appointment from the usual half-hour to fifteen minutes, avoid conversations, cut the hour spent with his mother in half, and consider placing her in an inexpensive old folks’ home. He should sell his budgerigar, see Miss Daria rarely or not at all, and stop spending time singing, reading, and meeting friends. He is also advised to put an accurate clock on the wall and time the apprentice to the nearest minute. The list translates an abstract promise into a schedule governing work, family care, leisure, and companionship.

Recruitment Without a Contract

When Mr Figaro asks what happens to the time he saves and whether he must pay it in or keep it somewhere, the agent assures him that the Bank will take care of it and will not mislay a second. He adds that Mr Figaro will find he has none left over. The assurance offers no account that Mr Figaro can inspect and no concrete explanation of how the system operates; instead, the agent asks him to trust the institution.

Mr Figaro also asks whether he should sign a contract or receive a policy. The agent rejects the need for either, describing time-saving as a matter of absolute trust and saying that Mr Figaro’s word is sufficient, especially since he cannot go back on it. He insists that the Bank does not pressure its customers and leaves the amount saved up to Mr Figaro. The gap between this claim of voluntary choice and the agent’s carefully engineered appeal is central to the scene: the visitor has made the plan seem like Mr Figaro’s own decision before departing.

After welcoming him into the ranks of the timesaving movement, the agent leaves in his car. The smoke from his cigar lingers in the shop; as it clears, the figures on the mirror disappear, and Mr Figaro’s recollection of the visitor disappears with them. What remains is the resolve to save time, which Mr Figaro believes he formed independently. The recruitment thus outlasts the recruit’s memory of being recruited: the visitor vanishes from his account of events, while the visitor’s prescription continues to direct his choices.

The Savings Put into Practice

Mr Figaro begins immediately. His first customer receives a surly, minimal service, and Mr Figaro finishes in twenty minutes rather than the usual thirty. He applies the same treatment to later customers. As the business expands, he hires two assistants in addition to his apprentice and watches their work closely to ensure that no moment is wasted. A notice on the shop wall declares, “TIME SAVED IS TIME DOUBLED!” The slogan turns the agent’s promise into a public rule for the workplace, while the clock and timetable make efficiency visible in the daily conduct of workers.

The program reaches beyond the shop. Mr Figaro sends Miss Daria a short, businesslike note saying that pressure of work will prevent him from seeing her in future. He sells his budgerigar to a pet shop and places his mother in an inexpensive old folks’ home, visiting her only once a month. He carries out the visitor’s recommendations as if they were his own, each sacrifice justified by the expectation that saved time will eventually make another life possible.

Instead, Mr Figaro becomes increasingly restless and irritable, and whatever time he saves is never available to him as spare time. His days seem to contract: weeks, months, and years pass in succession. The promised accumulation therefore reverses in practice. His routines become more tightly controlled, but the time supposedly released by that control cannot be found in his life.

The Event’s Wider Meaning

The recruitment episode gives a particular shape to the book’s larger account of time. Calendars and clocks can measure hours, but the narrative distinguishes measurement from lived experience: an hour may seem long or brief according to how it is spent. Its guiding idea is that time is life itself and that life resides in the human heart. Against that conception, the agent’s calculations recast life as a measurable store that can be enlarged by cutting away activities and relationships.

Mr Figaro’s experience also shows how the Bank’s discipline travels. It begins with an apparently private wish for a better future, becomes a list of personal economies, and then enters the shop as a timetable imposed on employees and customers. The consequences are not confined to him. As the same time-saving outlook spreads through the city, people fail to notice that their lives are becoming poorer, bleaker, and more monotonous; children suffer especially because adults no longer have time for them. The event’s closing irony is therefore collective as well as personal: the more people save, the less they have.