Lightning Rods (6 page)

She was staring at him and saying “I’ve never heard anything like it.”

She said: “You mean it would be like the advertised job and you would also sleep with people?”

“No no no no no!”

Joe was horrified that she could even
think
such a thing.

He explained: “It is of the utmost importance to avoid anything approaching personal contact. Absolute confidentiality is essential. The man must never know which member of staff has been involved. The women must never know which man has been selected. Typically a cubicle is specially built leading off the men’s and women’s lavatories. The man is only ever in contact with the body below the waist.”

The woman seemed unconvinced.

Joe elaborated: “I should add that this confidentiality extends to the highest levels. The appointment of lightning rods is not made by personnel; it never appears on a woman’s file. They are administered by an exterior body. To all intents and purposes, as far as personnel is concerned, they are ordinary members of staff.”

The woman said distastefully that it was too much like prostitution and she would not like to work in a place where something like that was going on.

He said: “We are not looking for prostitutes. We are looking for highly qualified professionals.”

He said: “I have strong views on sexual harassment. A properly run organization protects its employees. You are better off working in an office with a system of lightning rods than in the type of environment which makes no realistic effort to manage the sexual impulses of its employees.”

The woman said suddenly: “How could the job advertised have been filled? The ad was in the paper yesterday.”

He said: “The fact is we are conducting a survey of attitudes.”

He said: “Thank you very much for cooperating. Would you be willing to take a few moments to complete a questionnaire?”

The woman said angrily that he had wasted too much of her time already.

So it was quite helpful. He let a few days go by before making any more appointments, and then he was able to say they had found what they wanted on the first day.

The next candidate was younger and blonde. He seated her at the computer for a word processing test and from his desk watched the material of her skirt which pulled tight when she sat down.

She tested at 70 wpm.

Joe explained the dilemma facing many companies today.

He added persuasively: “It’s not for me to tell people what their goals are.”

He said: “I believe women identify their own objectives. Why, I could tell you stories—we had one woman, a very bright gal, had her heart set on law school. She was looking at five, six years of night school. When I outlined the package we were offering she said, ‘That’s me taken care of then. In two years I can earn enough to pay for a full-time program.’ But it’s not just for the career-minded. Many women today find themselves bringing up a family alone. A woman with a young family to support may find herself working several jobs, evenings, weekends. Through no fault of her own she is not there to give the moral guidance of a responsible adult. The children drift into drugs, crime. If I can give a woman the opportunity to make her own choices you can bet I’m going to do it.”

She said: “I don’t know.”

He said: “It’s not for everyone. We’re looking for the kind of woman who is confident about herself. The kind of woman who has aims she wants to achieve. We’re looking for someone with maturity. We’re looking for someone who wants to make a real contribution to the company and expects to be compensated accordingly.”

She said: “I just don’t know what to say.”

He said: “Are you in a relationship?”

She said: “Well, no.”

You want to hear something scary?

You want to hear something really scary?

She bought it.

AN ATMOSPHERE OF MUTUAL RESPECT

One of the mistakes that Joe made in the beginning was to assume that the biggest problem would be finding women who would be willing to do the job. The way he looked at it was that there were all
kinds
of reasons why anyone who had the skills to do straight office work would not want to branch out, no matter
how
big the pay-off. Whereas finding companies to install the facility would, he assumed, be relatively straightforward. Everybody
knew
sexual harassment was a major problem; everybody
knew
that issuing directives and guidelines that stayed, like as not, in the bottom of people’s In tray was not the answer to that problem.
Especially
since the results-orientated type of guy who tended to transgress the boundaries was the
least
likely to waste time reading memos on sexual harassment. In fact, if somebody has time to spend reading that kind of garbage that’s probably not an individual you want on your workforce in the first place. If cuts have to be made, that individual is going to be one of the first to go, thus further eroding the number of people in the workplace who have familiarized themselves with the sexual harassment policy.

The result was that Joe seriously underestimated the time he was going to need to get this baby off the ground.

When he had talked nineteen women into believing that they could be the woman in a thousand, all in just under two weeks, he began to feel he could do no wrong. All the self-doubts that had plagued him in the days of selling encyclopedias and vacuum cleaners just slipped away. If he could sell this he could do
anything
. Every salesman knows the feeling of incredulous euphoria that comes when you have miraculously managed to shift a product nobody in their right mind would buy. Every salesman knows the feeling of rapturous disbelief that comes when you’ve gone through the pitch you came up with for that unshiftable product and somebody actually
swallowed
it.

Multiply that feeling by nineteen and Joe’s conviction that he could do no wrong will not seem so far-fetched. But as every salesman knows, that’s a dangerous conviction to have. You’re only as good as your last sale. What works in one context won’t necessarily work in another. If you get to thinking you can sell things standing on your head with one arm tied behind your back, sooner or later a customer is going to start to wonder: Why would I want to buy something from some idiot standing on his head with one arm tied behind his back?

If someone had asked Joe, when he first rented the office, whether he genuinely believed this was something that could happen, Joe would probably have said, “I don’t honestly know.” But once he had nineteen ladies signed up, every one of whom had accepted every word he said as the Gospel truth, there seemed to be absolutely no reason why all should not come to pass exactly as he had described it. All he had to do was find some people prepared to hire those nineteen ladies, and it was a done deal.

It was time to approach the business community.

He made a point of going straight to the top. People who have worked in personnel for a number of years, he felt, tend to think in clichés and be resistant to new ideas.

He presented the product as a solution to the issue of sexual harassment. Without, obviously, going into a lot of unnecessary detail in his introductory letter.

He wrote to 1,000 companies. 800 didn’t bother to reply.

A lot of people said they had everything under control.

Twenty agreed to see him.

The first time was the hardest. He had thought it over a million times, but he had never gone into someone’s office where he had made an appointment and sat down and explained it out loud. He had deliberately gone straight to the top, which meant he was talking to a guy who had what it takes to succeed in a competitive industry and had made it to the top. The guy was wearing a suit as expensive as Joe’s. He stood up and shook hands when Joe came in and then he invited Joe to tell him what it was about.

Joe covered the points he had to cover. The guy was in his early fifties. He listened without much expression, putting in a couple of questions. When he was sure he understood what was being suggested he said, “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place. I won’t take up any more of your time.” And he buzzed through to his secretary and asked her to show the gentleman out.

That was the only appointment for the day. Joe went home and took off the thousand-dollar suit and hung it up. He took off the red silk tie and unbuttoned his collar.

He lay on the bed. This time he had a fantasy about a football team that had a hole in the wall of the locker room. The locker room was next to the changing room for the cheerleaders. One way of doing it would be for the cheerleaders to take it in rotation to provide an outlet for the players. Another way of doing it would be for each cheerleader to go once, and each player to go once. Another way would be to have an initiation for new cheerleaders, where a new cheerleader would be serviced by the whole team. They would have the try-outs for the cheerleaders, and the girls would work their butts off to make the cut, and then the head cheerleader, a real bitch, would have a new girl kneel on some kind of thing that rolled through the hole. The hole could be either right out in the open in the locker room where the players would line up to take their turns, or it could be in some kind of cubicle like a toilet stall.

Or you could have a row of holes in the wall, with all of the girls lined up, and the whole team could tackle them at the same time. You could have two installments. Offense and defense.

You could see them being rewarded in that way if they won. But what if they lost? What if there was a really major defeat?

The coach would probably be pretty pissed off.

Are you a bunch of asskickers or pussylickers? he’d shout, and when the cheerleaders were lined up he would order the team to go in with their tongues.

Aw but
Coach

Move it! the coach would shout. Anyone who’s not in there in the next five seconds is off the team, and that means you, Jerkovsky!

On the other side of the wall, an expression of incredulous bliss would gradually spread over the faces of the cheerleaders.

Or it might be that one guy screwed up royally. Dropped a pass. Missed a kick.

All right, the rest of you can go, the coach would say. Jackson, you’re not leaving until each and every one of those girls has had ten minutes by the clock.

Aw but
Coach

Get moving.

But what if one of them has her period?

Do
it.

Jackson would get started and every time he came up for air the coach would ram his face back down. A good coach knows that sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. Because at the very next game Jackson would be in a completely different league. He would be spotted by a talent scout, and in a few years he’d be playing at the Superbowl. And all because, throughout the game, the coach had the cheerleaders showing their pants in a routine that had more than its fair share of triple back flips. It was pretty good motivation for the rest of the team, too.

Joe lay on his side and he realized that he had gotten side-tracked yet again. Instead of beating up on himself, the way he usually would have, he just sent the victorious team back to the locker room for its reward.

Afterwards he sat up and put his feet on the floor. He thought suddenly Wait just a minute.

Something was bothering him.

It took him a while to put his finger on it. The thing that was bothering him was whether it could actually
happen
that way. Given the initial starting position of the cheerleaders. Because as he saw it those little short skirts definitely came ass backwards through the wall, allowing the team to go in for a quick forward pass. But it just didn’t seem realistic to have oral sex applied from behind, was that even
possible
?

Sometimes the best thing you can do with a fantasy is just accept that some of the details may be a little unrealistic. In the old days, before he started getting his life together, he would have thrashed out the problem just in case he might want to utilize the fantasy on some future occasion. Already he had moved on from that. The main thing was that he had gotten whatever it was out of his system. The fantasy, with all its undoubted flaws, had enabled him to achieve that.

There was a lesson to be learned from this.

Because as a salesman the question you have to ask yourself, when you do anything, is, “Why did I do that?” If you can find out the answer, you’ll understand just that much more about how other people tick, too.

He had thought he was prepared to face rejection, but the truth of the matter was it had been humiliating. The guy hadn’t even said anything. He’d just made up his mind that somebody who could come up with this kind of idea was some kind of human cockroach. You don’t waste time explaining to a cockroach that it’s not welcome, you just want it gotten out of the way without making a mess on the kitchen floor.

Well, it’s just a feature of the human psyche that when we undergo humiliation of some kind we tend to look for somebody else to humiliate, even if it’s just in our imagination.