Lightning Rods

LET THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY

Lucille had always thought of herself as pretty unflappable. The way she saw it was, she was the kind of person who could take things in her stride. She didn’t let things get to her. Whatever might be going on around her, she just got on with whatever it was she had to do. Also, she prided herself on her attention to detail. More specifically, she prided herself on paying attention to detail without getting obsessed about it. Basically she was the kind of person who could just get on with the job without making a fuss about it. Give her something to do and she would get the job done.

When she had started working she had taken all these things for granted. You’re there to do a job. So see what needs to be done, and do it. Can’t get much more obvious than that, right? Wrong.

What she had started realizing after a while was that most people just flew apart over things that she just took in her stride. The longer you work, the more you realize how many people can’t deal with things. Even if they’re paid to deal with them, they still can’t deal with them. So that somebody who just does what they’re paid to do really stands out.

Well, that’s fine. And it wasn’t that people had been unappreciative. People were always saying how much they appreciated working with someone they could trust to do the job right. They were always saying how great it was to work with someone who didn’t lose her head in a crisis. She’d worked in quite a few places, and each time word would get around and she’d be asked to help out by people she didn’t normally work for when something big came up, because if it was really big they wanted someone with an attention to detail who didn’t lose her head in a crisis. Fine.

It wasn’t exactly that the pay was bad, either. Her salary usually did reflect the value people put on her work. She would tend to be getting 20%, maybe 30% more than someone who was nominally in the same position—it wasn’t exactly that people weren’t prepared to put their money where their mouth was. And it wasn’t that she had to gouge it out of them, either. By the time she’d worked for someone a couple of months he couldn’t do enough for her; he’d be champing at the bit for the next chance to throw a bonus at her, or a raise. She’d never quit a job without being offered more money to stay.

The thing is, though, there’s recognition and recognition. The way Lucille saw it was, to be perfectly honest, she wasn’t 30% better than everybody else. What’s 30%, after all? Three-tenths. About a third. A third? I.e. her work was a third better than average? In your dreams. The way she saw it, she was about thirty times as good as the average PA, and ten times as good as the average senior PA, and she sure as heck wasn’t earning anything like that differential.

What actually tended to happen was she would end up picking up a lot of overtime.

In other words, the result of being head and shoulders above the rest was that she didn’t have a life to call her own.

What the new position seemed to offer, anyway, was some kind of recognition of the ability to take things in your stride. It was a way to parlay that ability into a remuneration package that went some way toward acknowledging its scarcity. In the longer term, it offered the chance to move up into a different sphere where her qualities would get something like their market value. Something about the woman who wanted to go to law school had struck a real chord. “What’s to stop me doing that?” Lucille had thought. “I could save up some money and go to Harvard Law School.”

The first few times were actually rather unpleasant. She had insisted on Joe putting in various safeguards which apparently hadn’t occurred to him, Joe not really being blessed with that kind of attention to detail. So she knew nothing could go seriously wrong. But there was something about taking off all your clothes below the waist and going backwards through a hole in the wall that felt quite uncomfortable. But the way she looked at it was, it was no different from what you put up with when you go to the gynaecologist. You just had to learn to take it in your stride. The way to look at it was, we all have to do things we don’t like in life. The important thing is to do something that offers appropriate compensation that enables you to do something you do want to do.

Besides, the thing to remember is there are two ways of looking at things you don’t like that life throws at you. One way is to emphasize the negative and just fall apart because every little thing isn’t exactly the way you like it. The other way is to look at it as an opportunity to practice dealing with things you don’t like. It’s a chance to practice not letting things get to you. You start out on little annoyances like the bus being late or running out of coffee when you don’t have time to go to the store, and you get to the point where you just don’t notice. Then you work up to slightly bigger annoyances, like just missing a bus when there won’t be another for an hour. You get to the point where you just take that in your stride. And each time something goes wrong you practice just dealing with the situation without getting worked up about it. If something comes along that you really don’t like, this is a chance to see how strong you are. If you can get through something potentially unpleasant without letting it interfere with your peace of mind, that tells you something about yourself. No matter what happens, nothing is going to drag you down. That’s an incredibly strong position to be in. You don’t get to that position by shrinking from a little unpleasantness.

So Lucille got through the first few weeks without any serious difficulties, and then Joe introduced the skirts. For some reason just the fact of wearing the skirt felt more protected somehow. From her own point of view, it was definitely an improvement. But the fact that she’d gotten through those first weeks without it meant she knew she could do anything, and that’s always a good thing to know.

The other early lightning rods found the practicalities of the job harder to adjust to. In later years, looking back on their experiences, a common theme was a feeling that they had been inadequately prepared. Basically Joe had just demonstrated how the message would appear on their screen and then taken them back to the disabled stall and demonstrated how the transporter worked, and that was it. Lucille by that stage had put it all behind her and was making a million a year as a litigation lawyer, but every once in a while she would pick up a paper and see a story about someone who hadn’t been able to put it behind her. Someone who had spent an unpleasant three weeks back in 1999 and had never recovered from the shock. Well, just reading between the lines Lucille could tell that this was someone who should never have gone in for that kind of work in the first place. If anyone had asked her, which they hadn’t, she’d have said it was a job where you definitely needed strength. To put people without that strength in the line of fire was just asking for trouble.





As Fur as You Kin Go





WORD OF MOUTH

What Joe would explain, when later confronted with this kind of criticism, was that at the outset the success of the facility was by no means the foregone conclusion it might with hindsight appear. In an ideal world he would obviously have wanted to spend more time making sure no one was doing anything she didn’t feel comfortable with. Unfortunately our world is very far from ideal, sustainable client development was absolutely vital to the success of the business, and it was up to him to singlehandedly pursue that goal for all their sakes. Regrettably, he had had to make some difficult decisions. If the ship went down, they would all go down with it. So he had to make some tough choices.

So while the early lightning rods were going through a period of adjustment, Joe was back out there gunning for the product. He had sent out some more letters while the builders were working, and he had made some more pitches. Just the knowledge that he had actually made a sale and that installation was underway gave him an edge. You can fake confidence in the sense that you can put on a good show, but what you can’t fake is the inner confidence that comes from success. Because no matter what you say to the customer, you always know the score. If the score is Sales: 0, let’s face it: you’re going to have to put on one hell of a good show.

One thing that really boosted his confidence, anyway, was that about a month after he introduced the short skirts he got a couple of calls from some guys who played golf with Steve. Joe had been absolutely right: Once Steve had committed to the project he had wanted to convince himself he had done the right thing.

In a lot of ways, obviously, he would have been better off just keeping it to himself, but that’s not the way people work. It’s lonely at the top; a guy who has made a big decision like this wants other people to make that decision too. So Steve had told a buddy of his, an older man who shared Steve’s conservative instincts and was not really comfortable with the mores of the younger generation.

“We’re businessmen, Al,” Steve had said. “At the end of day, we’ve got to be realistic. We’ve got to deal with people the way they are, not the way we might like them to be. If we can’t do that, hell, we might as well retire right here and now.”

The way Joe knew Steve had said this was that Al passed it on to explain his own reason for calling. Al had gone on to explain that he wasn’t ready to push up daisies yet, and that he appreciated an honest approach. It was like a breath of fresh air. “Let’s call a spade a spade,” said Al.

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Joe.

So Al had made an appointment for Joe to come and see him at a mutually convenient time.

Steve had also spread the good word to an up-and-coming younger businessman, who by the sound of it had said something that Steve had taken to imply that his management style was somewhat dated. Again, this is really not a good reason to go sharing information of a relatively delicate nature, but as it turned out no harm had been done. The kid called Joe and explained that he was opening a new office in Kansas City. Some of his key players from New York would be going over to get things started. The way he saw it was, their style might come as something of a shock to people from the Midwest; the last thing he wanted was for people to get their backs up just when they were supposed to be working together as a team. If he could get some lightning rods in place it might ease the tension, as well as making it easier on the out-of-towners.

“You bet,” said Joe.

“The way I see it is, now’s the time to get the installation in place, so it’s there when the office opens.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Joe.

“I think it plays better if we fly ’em in. It’s all fairly new, and I can see some problems if we try to recruit out in Kansas. Ever been to Kansas?”

“I was saving it,” said Joe.

“Great place. Great place. And some really great people. But they’re not what you would call sophisticated, you know, they see stuff on TV that they wouldn’t necessarily expect to come across in real life. You know? I mean, that’s why I think these lightning rods would be such a great idea in the first place. No point offending local sensibilities. But if you start recruiting locally it kind of defeats the object. Any problem getting staff to relocate?”

“No problem at all,” said Joe.

“Great. Great. So when can we get you out to the Big K? This weekend suit you?”

The Big K? thought Joe. Give me a break.

“Suits me just fine,” he said.

That’s sales for you. One minute you’re killing yourself just trying to get your foot in the door. The next minute someone is chasing you down the street because their mother’s uncle’s cleaning lady told them something about the product that made them feel life without the product would not be worth living.





PASTURES NEW

Joe flew out to the Big K that weekend to look at the new office and make arrangements for installation of the transporters and what have you. He should have been walking on air. Another sale, further easing of cash flow situation, what more could you ask? But the fact is that the whole time he was flying out to Kansas City the issue of the disabled toilet kept getting at him. He’d tried to get it out of his mind, but it just kept coming right on back. It was like the old roll-down blind debate, only magnified by a factor of a thousand.

He got in late Friday night. All he had was his carry-on luggage, so he went straight to the shuttle service that connected up to the Hilton. At this stage in the game he certainly couldn’t afford to stay at a Motel 6, with all that implied about cash flow being a cause for concern; no, the Hilton it had to be. At least his suit would look right at home.

Then a funny thing happened. He was standing in line for the shuttle, and the person ahead of him bent down to get something out of her suitcase, and he realized that the person standing in front of her was a dwarf. The guy couldn’t have been more than four feet tall. If that. He wasn’t really doing much of anything, just standing there being short. Then the shuttle bus drew up beside them.

The thing was, never having actually come across a dwarf in real life before, and only having seen Time Bandits a long time ago, Joe had never realized just how short a dwarf’s legs can be. The shuttle bus had a fairly low step, but it was way too high for that dwarf. Well, obviously the guy had had to deal with this type of situation before, he just took hold of the pole in the middle of the door and swung himself right on up, no problem. He had to hand the driver money to put in the fare dispenser, which was also way too high, and then he went back into the bus and he had to swing himself up again just to get onto one of the seats—what kind of a way is that to go through life?

Joe paid his fare and then he went back into the bus and sat down, a long way from the dwarf. One of the first lessons you learn in life is to avoid men of below-average height. There’s something about being short that makes a man feel he has something to prove, say he stopped growing at 5'6", a couple of extra inches would have made all the difference, instead of going with the flow he tends to be aggressive if not downright mean. Take away another couple of inches, and you’re into mean son of a bitch territory. Take it right on down to 3'11" and God only knows what you’re up against. Best to keep a safe distance.

Anyway, the bus pulled out, and Joe’s mind reverted to its bête noir: the disabled toilet. And the thing he suddenly realized was that the disabled toilet would be way too high for someone like this dwarf. No better than any of the other toilets, in fact, except that it had a rail he could use to climb up onto the seat. And if you stop and think about it for a minute, when was the last time you saw a toilet with a dwarf icon on the door? Well, what kind of world do we live in when we give people no option but to climb up onto the seat whenever they need to answer the call of nature?

Joe was still thinking this indignantly when one of the other passengers, a big fat guy with a paunch, decided to pick on the dwarf. The fat guy had also had to sit at the front of the bus, on one of the long seats that back onto the side rather than facing the front, because it was the only seating that would accommodate him comfortably. Not that the guy was so big he couldn’t take the width of the other seats. He was big, but he wasn’t that big. No, the problem was the distance between the seats was such that a guy with that size of paunch wouldn’t have been able to squeeze it in between the seat he was sitting in and the back of the seat in front. So the guy was sitting up front, where he had a whole aisle to let the paunch breathe freely, and he was sitting facing the dwarf, who was reading a book.

Fat Guy: “Watcha reading, big guy?”

Joe was thinking I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. Big guy? What kind of insensitive pig comes right out and says something like that to someone you know has got to be sensitive about his height? It wasn’t even that the guy was out to torment, looking at him you could tell he thought he was just being friendly. Jesus.

Joe waited for the dwarf to pull a switchblade and sling it straight into the unsuspecting paunch. Or stamp his heels to reveal a line of razor blades in the soles of his shoes. Wanna try a little kick boxing, big guy? the dwarf would say, and before the guy knew what hit him the dwarf would be in the air, slashing out—

“The John Foster Dulles Book of Humor,” said the dwarf.

“Huh,” said the guy. “Any good?”

“I’m only up to page two.”

“Well, to tell you the truth, John Foster Dulles is not someone I would have tended to associate with humor. Or anything else, come to think of it.”

“That’s a mistake a lot of people make. There’s a lot more to JFD than meets the eye.”

JFD? thought Joe. JFD?

“Is that a fact. The name’s Paul, by the way.”

“Ian.”

“Pleased to meet you, Ian.”

Joe was wondering why it was that Kansas had never acquired a reputation for being strange. If somebody can go around calling John Foster Dulles JFD and nobody bats an eyelash you have to ask yourself what are the rest of them like? And no sooner had he asked himself why word hadn’t gotten out than the answer came to him, just like that. The reason nobody knew about it was that normal people never came to see what was going on. Not realizing what the state had to offer they went elsewhere for their kicks. People from out of state tended not only to be but to stay just that: out of state.

“People tend to not know a lot about him. The fact is that he was quite an interesting guy, it’s just that Ike hogged the limelight.”

“Ike?”

“Eisenhower?”

“Oh, right, right. Right.” There was a short pause. “You know,” said Paul, “history was never my strong point, but for some reason I always thought Eisenhower’s first name was Dwight. Am I getting him mixed up with someone else?”

“Ike was a nickname,” said Ian.

“Oh. I see.”

“As in ‘I like Ike.’ It was his slogan when he ran for president.”

“You don’t say. Now I never knew that.”

“Where you from, anyway?” asked Ian, which was exactly what Joe had been wondering.

“Well, I’ve been all over the place, but I was born in Keene, New Hampshire.”

Joe mulled this over. Maybe Kansas wasn’t so strange after all. Maybe Keene, New Hampshire was the outpost of the Twilight Zone.

Ian closed his book and stuck it in the pocket of his carry-on bag. “I’ve never been that far east, myself,” he said. “I hear the autumn leaves are quite a sight.”

“They certainly are,” said Paul. “They’re a sight to behold.”

“Well, it’s been nice talking to you,” said Ian. “This is where I get off.” He pushed a button in the pole by the seat. The bus pulled to a stop. “Hope you enjoy your stay in Kansas City.”

“Why, thank you,” said Paul. “And the same to you.”

Ian got off the bus. The bus moved on.

Joe thought suddenly: Instead of a fixed alternative toilet, what we need is something with an adjustable height, like a dentist’s chair! Something you could pump up and down! Or maybe just raise electronically! But if you can raise it up and down, what’s to stop you from taking it right down? So it’s completely out of sight! Under a panel in the floor! Should the cubicle be required for some other purpose, such as answering a call of a different nature!

And he thought: Maybe the adjustable height toilet already exists!

The bus was moving swiftly down a broad, straight, empty street with no traffic to get in its way. Every second was bearing him further away from someone who would almost certainly have the answer to this crucial question.

Joe sprang into action. “Driver!” he shouted. “Stop the bus! That was where I wanted to get off!”

“I thought you said you wanted the Hilton,” said the driver, with the helpfulness for which Jayhawkers are famous.

“I need the exercise!” said Joe desperately, while the bus bore him further and further along.

“I can let you off at the next stop,” said the driver.

“I think I’m going to throw up!” said Joe, clapping a hand over his mouth.

The bus pulled silently to the curb.

Joe could tell the driver knew he was lying and was just too polite to say so. He hurtled out the door before the driver could change his mind.

He turned and ran back in the direction of the last stop, cursing his carry-on luggage.

One good thing was that Ian would not have covered a lot of ground in the interim.

Sure enough, five minutes of sprinting brought him gasping up behind an unmistakable figure.

“Wait!” gasped Joe. “Wait!”

And he stopped at last, panting, by his side.

“Can I help you?” asked Ian.

“I hope so,” panted Joe. He stood panting. He really needed to be getting more exercise. Maybe he should lay in a supply of Special K. Walk to the store instead of taking the car. Or maybe more serious measures were called for. Join a gym. Work out for an hour every day . . .

“Uh,” said Joe. No way this was not going to be embarrassing. “Please don’t take this the wrong way,” he said. “I, uh, I’m helping a friend who’s opening an office here. I, uh, I thought as long as we’re starting from scratch we should have a toilet with adjustable height in the alternative cubicle, and I, uh, I just wondered if you happened to know of such a thing.”

“No,” said Ian. “I don’t think I’ve ever come across anything like that.”

“Oh,” said Joe. “Oh, well, I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

“That’s all right,” said Ian. “Was there anything else?” He was obviously itching to go home and get back to The John Foster Dulles Book of Humor. Well, it takes all kinds to make a world.

“No,” said Joe. “Thanks for your help. That is, do you happen to know how I would get to the Hilton from here?”

“The Hilton?” said Ian. “That’s way across town. Were you planning to walk?”

“Unless you have a better idea,” said Joe. Interestingly, now that he was actually talking to the guy he was beginning to see that underneath all the shortness was a real human being. A human being who called John Foster Dulles JFD, but a human being for all that.

“I think your best bet is to go right back the way you came,” said Ian. “Fourth set of traffic lights, take a right, keep going, I think it’s a couple of blocks, could be three, you come to a strip mall with a KFC. You should be able to get a taxi there. Otherwise there’s the bus, but at this time of night they only come once an hour.”

“OK,” said Joe. “I think I got that. Fourth set of lights, right, two or three blocks. Thanks. You’ve been a big help.”

He turned back the way he came. Fourth set of lights, right, two blocks. No problem.

His mind returned to its current preoccupation.

Walking back toward the Kansas City Kentucky Fried Chicken, carrying his carry-on luggage, Joe realized that he had had a very narrow escape.

For some reason, the whole time he’d been thinking about lightning rods he’d been thinking of people using the facility as people pretty much like himself. He hadn’t anticipated users in wheelchairs. He hadn’t anticipated users of significantly lower height. Well, in this day and age you can’t afford not to anticipate that kind of eventuality. There is absolutely no reason why someone in one of those categories should not be the kind of high-performance results-orientated individual whose services a company would want to retain. Which means any facilities made available to other employees have to be potentially available to individuals in the relevant categories.

Besides, there was more to it than just some kind of abstract fairness. If you think about it, it stands to reason a disabled person is going to spend a lot of time being frustrated. A guy who spends his life climbing up onto bus seats is going to be frustrated a lot of the time. And it stands to reason that sexual frustration is going to be part of the package. Which means that these are individuals who could well benefit from access to lightning rods, if their employer has not been too blinkered by his preconceptions to provide it.

The other thing he realized was that this adjustable toilet idea had real potential, even apart from solving his own particular disabled toilet problem. Why wasn’t something like that widely available? This could be his own small contribution to easing the lives of people whose needs were too readily overlooked. He could insist on an adjustable toilet being part of every lightning rod installation; sooner or later, you just knew something like that would catch on. Think how much mothers with little kids would appreciate it. In fact, if the whole lightning rod thing didn’t take off, he could just concentrate on developing and marketing his adjustable toilet.

And the third thing he realized was that he now knew why it was that he had never made a career out of sales. All right, he’d had his successes, but something just hadn’t clicked, and now he knew why. Basically, he wasn’t a salesman. He was an ideas man. And those are two very different animals. He just happened to have a talent for thinking up things no one had thought of before, and then persuading people that something they hadn’t happened to have thought of was indispensable. Sales is obviously a part of that. A big part. But it’s only part of a larger whole. And the thing that made that whole possible was that knack for coming up with ideas.

Having come up with the idea of the adjustable toilet, Joe was able to sell it to Jerry without too much trouble. Jerry said he thought Kansas City was just the place to introduce this novelty to the world. He started singing the Kansas City song from Oklahoma! and Joe joined right in, because you should never pass up an opportunity to bond with the client.

The fact that Jerry would sing the song about Kansas City, Kansas just showed how uneducated he was, because any idiot knows the Kansas City referred to in Oklahoma! is Kansas City, Missouri—the phrase “Kansas City, Mo.” is actually in one of the other songs. While the two cities are admittedly contiguous, though on opposite sides of the river, this just makes it all the more annoying for residents of Kansas City, Ka. when people make this kind of mistake. But any salesman knows you can’t afford to get pedantic with the client. The old saying, “The customer is always right,” harks back to this common knowledge. If you’re the kind of person who has to correct someone every time they make a factual mistake, you might just want to stop a moment and compare the average take-home pay of a teacher and that of a halfway competent salesman. Truth be told, you can make a hell of a lot more money by being wrong at the right time than by being right at the wrong time.

Most American kids know this instinctively, which is why they’re so often caught off-base when asked without warning to name the capital of Peru. They know that if it comes to the crunch, and they actually need to know the name of the capital of Peru, they can quickly retrieve the information from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But there are more important things in life than impromptu identification of obscure foreign capitals, and when it comes to those things Americans are second to none. When it comes to making somebody feel good who is going to give you hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of business, an American will be shaking hands on the deal while the smart-ass is still waiting for a round of applause because he knew whatever it was without having to look it up.

The main thing was that the adjustable toilet was a done deal. And for that, Joe would have sung just as wholeheartedly in Kansas City, Mars.

The result was the Joe was much busier than he had expected to be just getting Jerry’s outfit up and running. He had to fly out to recruit unifunctional staff, and then he had to fly back to get the prototype toilet installed, and what with one thing and another he wasn’t really able to keep his finger on the pulse at his first installation. He had other things on his mind. Joe gradually got more and more involved in his adjustable toilet project over in the Big K, and by the time the whole installation was in place the cubicle also featured an adjustable sink, an adjustable hand dryer, and an adjustable towel rack, not to mention an adjustable condom and lubricant dispenser and adjustable transporter. The place was so designed that a person of sub-average height would be just as comfortable as anybody else. Joe kept wishing there was some way he could track down Ian and show him what he’d accomplished, since he was probably the only person Joe knew who was capable of appreciating it.

It wasn’t that Joe was spending all his time in the Big K, obviously. He was back and forth. But that was where the focus of his attention was. For some reason, the more he worked on the project, the more aware he became of just how unique it was in terms of the world at large. Every company is required to have conveniences for disabled users, but if somebody happens to be an unusual size the message is “Why didn’t you go before you left home?”

In some ways it was easier to get fired up about something like this than it was about the actual lightning rods. With the lightning rods, in a sense you were protecting people from something that was no fault of their own, i.e. a tendency to insult female staff through some kind of testosteronal imbalance. But that does seem to be something people could in some sense do something about. Whereas what kind of a world is it that acts like height was something you could change if you had the willpower? It wasn’t even as if you were talking about a minority, or something you were expecting to go away, there were millions of kids in the world and the situation wasn’t likely to change so what was the problem? In some ways Joe was tempted to just leave the whole lightning rods thing and go with the new idea, which obviously had huge potential since nothing like it had ever been tried before.

The problem was, there’s a difference between selling a solution to a perceived problem and selling a solution to something that is not perceived as a problem. People perceive million-dollar sexual harassment suits as a problem. They do not perceive the struggles of persons of short height as a problem, or at least, if it is a problem, it’s not their problem. So whereas Joe knew that as long as he stuck with the lightning rods cash flow would not be a problem, he also knew, unfortunately, that if he put all his eggs in the basket of the adjustable toilet he’d be back killing time in a trailer before you could say Jack Robinson—without even the chance of a free pumpkin pie.

Still, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Joe always made a point of having complete control over his lightning rod installations, and he had now made a vow to have height-friendly facilities in every single one. The way he saw it was, if the lightning rods took off the way it was starting to look like they were going to, the adjustable features would gradually become familiar to people, and sooner or later they would just be standard in all public conveniences.

And in the meantime, the disabled toilet was a real weight off his mind. With his new installations what happened was, the same mechanism that activated the transporter automatically took the toilet right down into the floor, where a sliding panel covered it for the duration. Since he was starting from scratch, he was also able to achieve an ambience that was a little less clinical than the one he had had to offer his original clients.

Unfortunately nobody has worked out a way to be two places at the same time. While Joe was otherwise occupied, the pot was starting to notice that no one was watching.