A diplomatic mission is an organization like no other. Its members live and work away from home, and the line between their professional and personal lives is blurred to an extent most outsiders do not fully understand or appreciate. In the average workplace, a supervisor is not concerned with what employees do at home. That is not the case in a diplomatic mission. Its staff is a community, and excessive drinking, a nasty divorce, threats of violence or a suicide is not just one family’s problem. It affects the section in which that person works, and often the entire mission. The chief of mission has not only authority over almost everyone at post, but also responsibility for their security and well-being. So managing such a workplace is a unique and daunting task, made even more difficult by being in a foreign country.

This chapter explores one of the Whipple Museum’s most popular cheap scientific ‘toys’, ‘Consul the Educated Monkey’. It investigates the tacit and explicit meanings of an object in the Whipple’s collection that is at once a mechanical calculator and a depiction of a monkey. This unusual amalgamation offers us a window into the world that made and used it, including how people thought about mathematics, education, and childhood in the early twentieth century. Consul’s invention coincides with the rise of public education and Progressivism in the United States, and this science toy embodies such cultural trends by providing fun ways to learn arithmetic and by bringing mathematics into the home as well as school. I suggest that Consul bridged the boundaries between school and home, work and play, and adulthood and childhood, making the red-suited calculating monkey a valuable informant about early twentieth-century American culture.