Lightning Rods

TROUBLE

If you’re in personnel one of the things you learn is never to be surprised by anything people do. Because it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in the business, you think you’ve seen everything, and they can still surprise you.

This applies even more if you have been in personnel since the days when it was called personnel. If you have spent a lifetime dealing with people, at first in the context of a personnel department, and later, moving with the times, in a human resources task force, you get to the point where you think there’s nothing new they can throw at you. You’ve seen the nicest people you could imagine engaging in systematic theft of supplies, you’ve seen the shameless use of the office phone to distant parts of the globe, and again it’s often the nicest people who are the guilty parties. The fact is there is something about an office environment that tempts people to operate with a completely different moral code from the one they were brought up with. If they actually were brought up with a moral code, which to be honest sometimes you really have to wonder.

Roy had been dealing with people, one way and another, for over thirty years, so it did not surprise him to discover that something was going on. If you’re used to dealing with people you know how important it is not to let abuses go unchecked. If something irregular gets established and taken for granted, to the point where everybody does it, you are only going to be able to stamp it out with a lot of bad feeling. An experienced human resources operator knows the cost of bad feeling. Sometimes it’s the price you have to pay. But it does come with a price tag, make no mistake about that, so if you can stamp out whatever it is before people have started thinking of it as a God-given right, believe you me you had better hop to it.

Roy was not surprised to find that something was afoot. But in spite of all his years dealing with humans in all their manifold variety, what that something might be never crossed his mind in his wildest dreams.

What happened was that Roy, over the years, had taken to using the disabled cubicle in the Men’s. Even as a boy Roy had been what the Sears Roebuck catalog called husky, and over the years he had gone on quietly expanding. Sears did not have a name for adult men with a six-foot waist, and eventually Roy had had to stop ordering his clothes from a catalog; for a while he had taken to buying his clothes at Walmart. Then he had come to his senses. As a personnel officer he knew none better that it’s important to accept yourself the way you are. If you look at Minnesota Fats in the movie The Hustler, Minnesota Fats is actually better dressed than the Paul Newman character. Fats knew he was the best, and he dressed the part. So Roy had bought a five-hundred-dollar tailored suit at a time when five hundred dollars was a lot of money, and he always flew first class when he flew, and he always used the disabled cubicle in the Men’s Room.

One day he was sitting on the toilet in the disabled cubicle, taking his time, when a couple of guys walked in and started taking a leak. One of them laughed to the other, “Jeez, it’s f*cking 9:15 and somebody’s on a disability. Hoo boy.”

That was all Roy heard. He got up with help from the bar, and thought no more of it. But the next day he was in the cubicle and a couple of guys came in and they were talking again.

One said he was going to take his disability and call it quits for the day.

The other guy said, “Hoo boy.”

Now what Roy naturally thought was that this was some kind of variation on calling in sick for the day. The fact that this practice, whatever it might be, had developed its own slang, showed how far things had spread. Something was afoot that was going to have to be nipped in the bud.

The first thing Roy did was to go back to his office and check up on absenteeism patterns in the past month. Plenty of men his age swore at computers. Roy swore by them. You could get an overall picture of what was going on in a place of work in five minutes that you couldn’t have gotten in a year fifteen years ago. The thing to remember is, a computer is a tool. It’s there to help you do what you want to do. Used properly, a computer can be a valuable aid in determining what exactly it is that you want to do. But at the end of the day it’s just something to take care of things that would bore a human because they would take too long. It’s a machine, if you will. Neither more nor less.

Anyway, in five minutes Roy had gotten a picture of absenteeism in the past month that had him staring and scratching his head. “Holy son of a gun,” said Roy, looking at the little chart the computer had produced on his screen. In thirty years he’d never seen anything like it.

Absenteeism in the firm had reached an all-time low. In a building that housed 500 employees, ten had had a sick day in the last month. The rate was the same for the previous month. Roy went back six months. Month after month it was the same story. Then six months ago the figures were back up to where he would have expected them to be.

Something had been going on for six months and it had taken him completely by surprise.

“Holy moly,” said Roy. He took out one of the jumbo bags of peanut M&M’s that he kept in his bottom drawer and tore a small hole in the corner.

He decided that today he would start with green.

He shook a few M&M’s onto his pad, ate the green one, and put the rest in a bowl.

“Darned if I ever seen anything like it,” he said, popping another green M&M and tossing a few more into the bowl.

One of the great things about a computer is it can tell you just about anything you might want to know without even getting up out of your chair. All you have to do is ask it the right question is all.

Roy decided that he would do a breakdown by number of days off work. He got through three or four M&M’s setting up the search parameters, and then he ran the search.

“Jumping Jehoshophat!” exclaimed Roy.

Nobody had been off work for more than one day except a guy who had broken his leg.

He ran a search according to age without throwing up anything of interest. Then he ran a search by department and that didn’t throw up anything either.

Roy ate five green peanut M&M’s and swept a confused jumble of yellow, brown, red, and blue M&M’s into the bowl.

Roy always saved the blue for last. When he was down to the blue he would put them in a separate bowl and put it out at Reception for visitors to help themselves to. No matter how many visitors they had the level in the bowl never went down that fast. It just went to show what a mistake Mars had made in departing from its tried-and-true formula. You couldn’t blame them for trying, but Roy couldn’t help wishing someone in that company would be man enough to admit he had made a mistake.

Roy decided to run a search by sex.

“Well waddya know,” said Roy. Nine of the ten sick employees were women. The tenth was the guy who had broken his leg.

For some reason male employees were finding it a lot more appealing to come in to work than they had six months ago. But as a matter of fact so were the female employees. Because even nine in a month was significantly down on the number of female employees who had been off sick six months ago.

“Huh,” said Roy.

He spread out the rest of the bag of M&M’s on his desk, finished off the greens, put the rest in the bowl, and pondered.

He decided to start on the reds.

Half an hour later Roy came out of his office carrying a bowl of blue peanut M&M’s.

“Care for a peanut M&M, Stell?” he said to his secretary, or personal assistant as they called them these days.

“No thanks, Roy,” said Stella.

Roy wished the manufacturers could hear her. Maybe then they’d rethink this newfangled shade of M&M which they had foisted on a reluctant public.

“Stell,” said Roy, wondering how to phrase this. “Have you noticed anything unusual or out of the way in the office recently? Say in the last six months?”

“I can’t say that I have,” she said. “What kind of thing did you have in mind?”

“Well, I don’t exactly know, for sure,” said Roy, absentmindedly eating a blue peanut M&M. He was not entirely surprised by the response. In Roy’s opinion the thing to look for in a secretary, or personal assistant, was the ability to take each day as it comes. You don’t want Einstein. If by some accident you end up with Einstein, you’re in trouble. Big trouble. Any personnel officer will tell you the same. Stella was no Sherlock Holmes, but then he hadn’t hired her to be Sherlock Holmes. One of the first rules of recruitment is that if you hire someone to not have certain qualities because you perceive those qualities to be inimical to the satisfactory fulfillment of the job requirements, you should not then turn around and blame the person for not having the qualities you chose them not to have in the first place. It may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how many people forget this seemingly obvious fact in the heat of the moment.

Roy decided to inconspicuously wander around before going to Reception.

“Hi, Roy,” said Lucille, not looking up from her terminal. The tread of the head of human resources, so reminiscent of that of an approaching elephant, had been familiar to her by the end of the first week on the job.

“Peanut M&M?” offered Roy.

“No thanks,” Lucille said politely.

Roy only wished the manufacturers could hear.

“Peanut M&M, Stephanie?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” said Stephanie.

“Take all you want,” urged Roy. “I’m just taking them over to Reception.”

Stephanie took four. The phone rang.

“Peter Drake’s office, how may I help you?”

Lucille didn’t know whether the new girl was a lightning rod or not. She liked it that way. It meant for once Joe was doing his job.

Roy hesitated, then moved on to a cluster of desks where no one was on the phone. Lucille took the opportunity to write on the back of a message pad “I wouldn’t eat those if I were you.”

Stephanie hung up. “Whyever not?” she asked.

Lucille raised an eyebrow. “He goes through the whole bag,” she said. “Color by color. So by the time he’s gotten down to the blues he’s got to have handled them all about four times. One for each color. Then he takes them to Reception. Can you imagine?”

The new girl made a face. “Gross me out,” she said. She surreptitiously slipped the M&M’s into her trash can. “Oh my God, I think he saw me,” she said.

Roy realized that the girl had only accepted to be polite. The manufacturers just did not seem to have realized that it wasn’t just him. Nobody wanted to eat the damn things.

Men were walking between the desks here and there. Was it his imagination, or were they walking with a jauntier step?

Was it his imagination, or was there a different atmosphere about the place?

Roy absentmindedly ate another blue M&M.

The thing was, if morale had improved that was obviously all to the good, but whatever it was it was important for human resources to be kept apprised. Because whatever it was was something human resources could probably improve on. That was why it was important to keep your finger on the pulse. Otherwise you ended up with amateurs, who didn’t really understand what was involved in dealing with people, dealing with issues they didn’t fully understand. So that later, when things had gotten out of control, it was left to the boys in human resources to pick up the pieces.

On an impulse, Roy stopped off at the desk of Laura Carter, who was secretary, or rather team support coordinator, to two of the younger marketing men. Laura had gone through a bad patch about nine months ago. She had been off sick two and three days a week, and while there was always a valid medical excuse there was a pattern that a blind man could have seen.

What’s more, you didn’t have to be a genius to see that there was something about the sense of humor of the team that Laura had had trouble adjusting to. Things that members of the team had meant to be taken in the spirit in which they were intended had unintentionally caused offense, and unfortunately one or two members of the team had seen that they had touched a raw spot and had not been able to resist teasing the girl in a way they probably wouldn’t have if she had appeared not to mind. Ed Wilson, for example, had an exuberant way about him that most of the girls just took in their stride. Laura, for some reason, had had trouble handling it.

Well, Roy had happened to look at the names of the people who had been off sick in the last six months—this kind of thing comes as second nature to an old personnel hand—and one of the things he had noticed instantly was that Laura was not among them. Some people think that with all the hundreds of people in an organization there’s no way one man could keep track of them all. They’d be surprised. If you’ve been in the business long enough there’s precious little escapes you.

“Hi, Roy,” said Laura, not looking up from her screen.

“Hi, Laura,” said Roy. He noticed that Ed Wilson was not in his office. So much the better. “How’s every little thing?”

“Just fine, Roy,” said Laura. “I won’t stop if you don’t mind, I’m just finishing this off for Ed.”

“You go right ahead,” said Roy. “Care for an M&M?”

“I won’t just this minute, thanks,” said Laura.

You see? thought Roy.

“It’s good to see you looking so well,” said Roy. “It can take some time to adjust to the pressure of a job like this. Sometimes it takes people a while to settle down.”

“Well, I had a lot of health problems when I started out,” said Laura. “Which didn’t help. And I have to admit, looking back, there was a personality clash between Ed and myself, I was brought up in a certain way so there were some things about Ed’s behavior that according to the way I was brought up were inappropriate.”

Laura sent a document to print.

“I’ll have one of those M&M’s now,” she said. “This is really attractive, having all the blue ones in a bowl. Was that your idea to have a bowl of them in Reception? I always thought that was a nice touch. You know, when I was a little girl I used to wonder why they never had any blue ones, and then one day they brought them out. It was like, Somebody up there likes me!”

Well, thought Roy, there’s just no accounting for tastes. But a lifetime in personnel teaches you to take these things in your stride.

“Anyway,” said Laura, crunching an M&M, “my mother always told me as long as you respect yourself, sooner or later the message will get through. No matter what kind of upbringing someone has had, as long as you know the kind of behavior that is acceptable, sooner or later that fact is going to get across. It may take a little longer to communicate it to someone from a seriously disadvantaged background who doesn’t know any better, but eventually you’ll make your point.”

A good personnel officer knows there are times when you don’t know exactly how to respond. When those times come—and they come to the best of us—the best thing is to remain silent.

Roy ate an M&M.

“I have to admit I was getting pretty downhearted at the amount of time that had gone by with no apparent result,” said Laura. “And to be fair, it wasn’t just Ed, all of the team had an attitude that was not the easiest thing for someone from a different background to accept. But then one day it was the funniest thing. They just seemed to change overnight. I don’t know what brought about the change, but I presume it was just that the time had come. They realized somebody was going to have to change, and since I had demonstrated in no uncertain terms that it was not going to be I, they accepted that it was just going to have to be they.”

“And you can’t pinpoint some specific incident that might have triggered the improvement?” said Roy. Through no fault of her own, Laura was not in a position to see the larger picture. Whatever it was that the team had responded to seemed to have had that effect on everyone in the company. You can’t work in personnel without becoming something of a cynic, and Roy doubted that the ladylike comportment of their secretary had had such dramatic and far-reaching consequences.

“No, not really,” said Laura. “Although I remember they had all had appointments with a gentleman from a temporary agency who was investigating their requirements. It may be that he may have said something in passing which gave them that little additional insight into their behavior.”

This was the first that Roy had heard that the representative from the agency had talked to all the men on the team individually. This was highly unusual, and it would have really been more appropriate to clear it with personnel, but Roy couldn’t fault the agency. It had delivered some really first-class employees, girls Roy would have been happy to have offered a place on the team with no ifs, ands, or buts.

“Well, I’ll leave you in peace,” said Roy. “Keep up the good work!” Roy knew the value of an encouraging word even if some people didn’t.

He was no closer to the heart of the mystery than he had been when he started out. But that there was a mystery was something he didn’t doubt for one second. Something was afoot. The question was, what might that something be?

Roy was determined to leave no stone unturned until he got to the bottom of it.

Roy took the rest of the blue M&M’s to Reception.

At his size, he had to plan ahead. It was no good suddenly making the discovery that he urgently needed to go to the bathroom, since there was no way he could get to the bathroom in a hurry. So he decided to stop off on his way back to his office as a precautionary measure.

Roy sat on the disabled toilet, a prey to uncertainty. What was going on? There were no clues to speak of. What if the trail had gone cold?

He shook his head and sighed. He really should try to cut down. Three jumbo bags of peanut M&M’s per day just wasn’t healthy. Moderation in all things—that should be our watchword.

The thing was, though, that he had cut back at one point. He’d gotten down to one bag a day and he’d stuck to that religiously for a month. But by the end of the month he’d had to concede defeat. Because the problem was, it had impacted negatively on his performance. The human mind is a strange animal, no two alike, and for some reason the activity of going through the different colors of M&M was essential if his mind was to function at its best. And the job was such that a single bag just wasn’t adequate to see you through the manifold challenges that you were apt to meet in the course of a day. He had heard smokers make the same observation. Smoking is an unhealthy, anti-social activity that endangers everyone in the workplace, so the No Smoking policy was not up for negotiation, but Roy could understand their point of view, and he was not without sympathy for it.

Roy was about to pull himself to his feet when he heard a funny kind of click. A panel had slid open in the wall beside him. Roy stared. In the hole revealed by the panel were the soles of two bare feet pointing downward. While he watched, some kind of mechanism must have been operating, because gradually the feet moved out into the room. Bare calves came into view. Bare thighs. Bare—Holy mackerel.

He was looking at the naked lower portion of a woman. The mechanism had stopped. He couldn’t see anything above the waist. As it was he could see plenty. And then some.

I don’t believe I’m seeing this, he thought.

This wasn’t some casual sexual liaison among the staff. Someone had had to build this contraption and put a hole in the wall. How many people were involved? What would the shareholders think? Was it even legal?

Nothing happened.

I gotta get outta here, thought Roy.

He stood up, did up his pants and buckled his belt. He flushed the toilet.

The naked rear end of the woman hadn’t moved.

Jesus, thought Roy.

Roy had never had a girlfriend, and though he had been on a couple of dates when he was younger and thinner he had always been shy. This kind of thing was way out of his league.

I’m getting too old for this job, he thought. Roy had had to deal with a couple of unsavory incidents in his time. But what the dickens was he supposed to do about this? Who would he even tell? What was he supposed to say? He tried to imagine telling someone, Steve Jackson for example, about the naked lower portion of a woman.

I just can’t do it, he thought. A man from the younger generation would probably have taken something like this in his stride. Roy just couldn’t deal with it. He couldn’t even think of words he could bring himself to speak in the presence of another person. But how could he just walk away from it? It would be irresponsible to bury his head in the sand and pretend it hadn’t happened. But what the hell was he supposed to do?

Besides, there was another problem. How was he going to get out of here? What if he opened the door and there was someone out there? What if somebody saw? They’d think he had been involved in this. If you’ve been in personnel long enough you know how stories get around. There was no way somebody was going to keep something like that to himself. The story would get around, and everyone in the building would think there was something in it.

Somehow he was going to have to persuade the woman to take herself off.

Was there some kind of speaker or something somewhere so he could tell her to go away?

Roy looked around the cubicle, but he couldn’t see anything. Unless maybe this thingamajig by the toilet roll was some kind of communication device? He jiggled at it. An unopened condom fell out onto the floor.

Roy picked up the condom and tried to squeeze it back up inside the thing it had fallen out of. Three more fell out on the floor.

He considered trying to shove the four condoms back in, but the way things were going he’d just end up with a whole stream of the darned things piling up on the floor. He stuffed them into the inside pocket of his jacket.

There seemed to be absolutely nothing in the cubicle that would allow above-the-waist communication.

Well, maybe if he just kind of pushed on her legs she would get the message?

But what if she got the wrong idea?

Roy hesitated. This could be really embarrassing.

He had thought that things couldn’t possibly get any worse. Suddenly he realized just how lucky he had been when all he had to worry about was how to get rid of the visitor.

The handle of the cubicle turned just a fraction.

Someone was trying to get in.





THE HUMAN STALLION

Sometimes life forces you to learn things about yourself that you would rather not know.

Ed had always known he had drive. He just didn’t realize how much drive. But after the facility had been in place a month many guys actually found they weren’t making that much use of it, whether because of being in a relationship or whatever. So they would send screen messages offering their disability for a bottle of Scotch or whatever, and Ed started picking up extras. Soon he was using it five, six times a day.

Previously he had always thought the female staff unduly sensitive. Now he realized maybe it was not all their fault. They were working with a stallion in their midst, someone who could only work off his energies by using the DF an unrealistic number of times a day. Now that he had the outlet he knew he was a nicer person as a result of it. People had even commented on it.

So he had to give a lot of credit to the people who had devised the program for their insight into the workings of people with drive. It was kind of like going to a gym and working out on a punchbag. Instead of taking whatever it might be out on whoever happened to be standing by, you took it out on someone who was paid to have stuff taken out on them.

Anyway, once he had recognized that he had a problem he made a point of using the facility regularly even on the rare occasions when he didn’t feel like it.

Today a message from Mike had flashed up on his screen and he’d been in the middle of something, but he thought Might as well get it out of the way, so he clicked Yes to show he was coming. He had a big fax he wanted to get out, he could give that to one of the girls on his way over. Laura wasn’t at her desk, so he stopped off in the next department. Elaine was just standing up from her desk when he came by. He explained that he had an urgent fax that had to go out now and he handed it over.

Elaine seemed about to object.

“Look, I don’t have time for this,” said Ed. “Put it on the machine. Wait for it to go through. Put it in my In tray with the confirmation. Any problems, take an aspirin and call me in the morning.”

He strode off. He had just reached the door to the Men’s when he remembered he’d promised to call someone at two. It was now 2:05.

The lightning rod could wait. It was what she was paid for, after all. He headed back to his office and picked up the phone.

Elaine put the fax on the machine but it kept jamming on autofeed so she finally had to feed it in manually herself. The whole time she was there she was conscious of time passing. Finally the last sheet went through. Then the machine dialed the number but the number was busy. It dialed three times and then it just printed out a sheet saying it couldn’t get through so she had to feed all the pages again. This time she got a connection. She left the document on the fax machine and hurried to the Ladies. She was way too late.

Ed was back in his office on the phone, she could see. He’d probably want the fax back immediately. Well, too bad.

She hurried into the disabled. Sure enough, the light was on; the guy was already in the other cubicle. No time for the skirt today. He wouldn’t be seeing anything he hadn’t seen plenty of times already.

She undressed from the waist down, got on the transporter and went backwards through the wall.

Nothing happened.

She glanced at her watch. She wished the guy would just get on with the show so she could get back to work. Ed was going to want that fax back.

Time passed. She pictured the guy on the other side, desperately trying to get it up. If only Joe had installed some kind of way of communicating from one side to the other. She’d tried suggesting it, heck, they’d all tried suggesting it, but Joe just kept saying he’d get on to it as soon as he had the time. They all knew what that meant. Someone had once had an idea for improving the original notification, but getting Joe to do even the simplest little programming was like pulling teeth.

Ed, meanwhile, was getting irritated. He had finished his phone call and hurried over to the Men’s, only to find that someone was in the disabled stall. All the other stalls were free, and the company didn’t have any disabled employees, which could only mean one thing: Someone was helping himself to Ed’s disability. Or rather, they were really helping themselves to Mike’s dis, which Ed had snapped up for the going rate (a bottle of Johnnie Walker) because he might as well get it over with. So now Ed was a bottle of Scotch down and someone else was helping himself to the proceeds.

Ed rattled the door.

Inside the stall, Roy had suddenly asked himself a question. Why was somebody trying to get in? There were five other stalls. You couldn’t tell him all five were now occupied. And the company didn’t have any disabled employees, which could only mean one thing: Someone had turned up expecting to find this, this obscenity within the disabled stall and in all probability make use of it.

What this meant was that Roy found himself in a quandary. If he opened the door, he could put a name to a face. He could identify a member of the workforce and challenge him and the whole sordid business would come out. That was obviously the responsible course of action. But there was just one problem.

If Roy opened the door, he would be the one who was actually in the stall with a naked half-woman. All the evidence would point to it being Roy who had turned up for this little rendezvous. It would be Roy’s word against whoever. There would be no actual proof that it was, in fact, the other man who had intended to use company time for R&R, and that Roy was just an innocent bystander who got caught in the crossfire.

Someone was pounding on the door with a fist.

Elaine, meanwhile, was wishing she had had time to pick up something to read.

The lightning rods had gradually accumulated a stash of magazines, but Elaine had read all the issues of People and Us Weekly and Mademoiselle and Elle and Marie Claire and Better Homes and Gardens at least once. People has never claimed to be War and Peace. It’s not really the kind of thing you keep reading and rereading, discovering new layers of meaning each time. It doesn’t pretend to be. Nor, for that matter, does Us Weekly. People don’t go back to the February 1999 issue of Mademoiselle and suddenly realize how much they missed the first time around because they were too young to understand. This is not a criticism—that’s what people like about them. But what this means is that if you’re stuck in a waiting room with back issues of People which you’ve already read you’re going to have a long wait. A wider range of preread magazines is not going to significantly improve the situation.

What this meant was that Elaine had time on her hands. She had a million things to do, the screen message had come at the worst possible time but then that’s men for you, if they have a choice between sex at a time when it’s convenient and sex when you have a million things to do they’ll go for the bad time every time. In this case, to be fair, the client hadn’t specifically picked her and she didn’t have to accept—she could have let someone else pick up the assignment. But then she’d just have had it hanging over her head for the rest of the day. If she’d waited she’d have ended up having to accept later in the day, probably at an even less convenient time. So when it had come up on her screen she’d thought Might as well get it over with. And now here she was, stuck, waiting for Rambo to get off the dime.

She found herself wondering, as she sometimes did, whether it was all worth it. Sure, the money was good, but who needs this kind of aggro?

The fact is, there’s no perfect job. You’re going to run into aggro whatever you do, so you might as well get paid for it. Most places just pretend the aggro doesn’t exist, why would they compensate you for working in an environment that’s just one big happy family, you’re lucky just to be working with such great people it’s not the money that counts it’s the people I don’t think so.

The important thing is just to be clear about your goals. If you go through a lot of extra aggro on a daily basis, and at the end of the year all you’ve got to show for it is a lot of clothes in your closet, don’t go looking for someone to blame if you spend what would have been your retirement selling secondhand clothes. Elaine had opened a separate account for her lightning rod earnings, and she put everything she earned on that side straight into that account. That money was going to put Hayley through college, and Elaine wasn’t going to touch a penny of it. She hadn’t had a lot of choices in her life, but Hayley was going to go wherever she wanted, no matter how much it cost. Money was just not going to be a consideration. In just six months she’d put $15,000 in the account. For $15,000 you can put up with a lot of back issues of People.

Elaine had reached this realistic conclusion, and now she’d been waiting fifteen minutes. What was the problem with the guy? Many women who provide sexual release for male clients in more orthodox settings have had this reaction to an unanticipated delay, but at least they can see that the client is trying. Elaine had no idea what the client was doing. If, in fact, he was doing anything at all. If, in fact, he was even there.

She’d been here sixteen minutes, and in all probability Ed Wilson was wearing a hole in the floor waiting for his fax. Right. You had your chance, Jack, and you blew it.

Roy was still mulling over his quandary when it was solved for him. There was a low whirring noise. The lower portion of the woman began to disappear through the wall. Soon there was nothing to be seen but her feet. Then her feet were gone, and the panel closed, and he was alone in the stall.

Someone was still pounding on the door.

Roy lifted the bolt and opened the door.

I shoulda known, he thought.

He was looking into the irate face of Ed Wilson.

It took two seconds for Ed to realize he’d made a mistake. It was only too obvious why Roy had chosen this particular cubicle when five where free. Ed wouldn’t have liked to have to lift 320 pounds of human flesh from a sitting position using nothing but his knees; in all probability Roy didn’t like it either.

“Sorry, Roy,” said Ed, thinking on his feet. “I thought I left my gym bag in here earlier. I coulda sworn this was the last place I had it, but I don’t see it. Guess I musta left it at the gym. Hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”

Roy had never really cared much for Ed’s sense of humor at the best of times. For some reason he could never think of a better come-back than “Ha, ha, ha. Very funny.” He was about to say “Ha, ha, ha. Very funny,” for want of a better idea, but Ed was already on his way out the door.

And now Roy was in a real quandary. Ed Wilson was one of the top performers in the company. Roy knew, none better, just what outrageous demands Ed had made and gotten away with in the past. Ed was always being headhunted, and every time Ed was headhunted he used it as an opportunity to demand some new and more outrageous level of compensation. Every time Ed made some new demand Roy would think This time he’s gone too far, this time he’s really done it—next thing he knew Ed would be driving around in the Lamborghini he’d demanded as a company car.

Well, it was only too obvious that Ed hadn’t personally knocked a hole in the wall. Something like this couldn’t happen without somebody approving it somewhere. What had obviously happened, incredible though it might seem to an outsider who didn’t understand the weird dynamic that operated between Ed and Steve Jackson, was that Ed had made yet another demand and Steve had just given in.

Well, if that was the case, just who was Roy supposed to report this to? If he took it to Steve, it wasn’t going to be Ed Wilson who was sitting at home with the Want Ads.

On the other hand, did Steve really know what he’d gotten himself into? Was something like this even legal?

It was a real quandary.

Elaine dressed, returned to the fax machine, picked up fax and transmission sheet, and went over to Ed’s office to drop them off. She got there just as Ed came striding up from the Men’s Room.

“It took you twenty minutes to send a fax?” said Ed, who was in no very good mood. “If I’da known it was gonna take twenty minutes I’da told you to walk it over.”

“It took five minutes,” said Elaine, in no very good mood herself. “The other fifteen I was doing something for Bob that I had to interrupt because you said this was urgent. Bob, just in case you’ve forgotten, is my boss. I presumed that the urgency of the fax pertained to transmitting the material to the recipient rather than transmitting the transmission sheet to you. I do apologize for this unfortunate misunderstanding.”

In the old days Ed would probably have said something direct and to the point. But the lightning rods had brought him to a new level of self-awareness which he had not had before; he knew the reason he was ready to strike out at anybody within range had nothing to do with the fax. Besides, he was suddenly conscious of things he would have been less conscious of in the old days. He had always been interested in breasts, obviously, but now he felt an appreciation for a full frontal view, even clothed, which he would once have taken for granted. Besides, he wasn’t one to hold a grudge. He liked a girl who could hold her own instead of letting you walk all over her.

“Did anyone ever tell you you’re beautiful when you’re angry?” he asked grinning.

“Let’s put it this way,” said Elaine, “it’s not exactly an original line.”

Ed laughed. He’d had four separate sessions today already, he could live with an isolated disappointment. Besides, Elaine was really attractive. She had dark red hair, and dark brown eyes, and a long, full, sexy mouth. He’d been working hard, no time to play, it had been a long time since he’d connected with someone from this direction.

“OK, I overreacted,” he said magnanimously. “I admit it. I overreacted. What can I say? Excess is my middle name. So I’ll make it up to you. Can I buy you a drink after work?”

“Much as I’d love to,” said Elaine, “I have to pick up Hayley from her homework center after work, and I have other plans for the evening.”

“Tell you what,” said Ed, who had not gotten where he was by taking polite or not-so-polite negatives for an answer, “I’ll take you to pick her up. How does that grab you? We’ll surprise her. Turn up in the Lamborghini, make her day. And then I’ll just drop you off, unless of course I can persuade you to cancel your plans.”

“Why, thank you,” said Elaine. “What a wonderful idea! Usually I have to use my own car to pick her up and drive home in, which means I have to give up my parking space. I then run the risk of not finding one in the morning after I drop her off at school on the way to work, especially if the traffic’s bad. This way I can just leave the car there overnight and take the bus in, and no matter what time I get in I’ll know I’ve got a parking space, because the car will have been there ahead of all the other people who took theirs home and then had to drive in again the next day. If only I’d thought of that before!”

Ed grinned. “No problem,” he said. “Gimme your keys, I’ll get one of the guys on security to drop it off for you. They owe me a coupla favors, and besides, they got nothing better to do, long as I pick up the cab fare, which I’m happy to do, Elaine, just to show you my heart’s in the right place.”

Elaine felt herself weakening. Ed was all right when you got to know him, you just had to make it clear you weren’t putting up with any bullshit. The person who had recruited Laura Carter to be his secretary had to have been insane, to put it mildly. Or on some weird peanut M&M trip or something.

“Well,” she said.

“It’s a deal,” said Ed. “Five o’clock?”

“Sure,” said Elaine, shrugging and giving in. In spite of herself she felt flattered. Ed usually stayed till 9 or 10 at night, at the earliest. And here he was basically leaving halfway through the day, and all for her.

At 5:20 the Lamborghini pulled up in front of Hayley’s school, which provided an after-school homework center for children of working parents. Hayley came down the sidewalk with her friends, obviously looking for Elaine’s Toyota. Then she saw Elaine in the Lamborghini.

Elaine had never seen anything like the look on her face, this kind of 1,000-watt look of amazement, as if somebody had explained that they’d decided to introduce a second Christmas to the year and today was the day.

“Mom?” said Hayley, coming toward the car, and all her friends came with her.

“This is Ed Wilson, from the office,” said Elaine. “Ed, I’d like you to meet Hayley.”

“Pleaseta meetcha,” said Ed, holding out a hand, and they shook hands across Elaine. Then Elaine got out to let Hayley into the back seat, and then she got back in, and then they took off.

“You guys in a hurry to get home?” said Ed, and Hayley said No before Elaine had a chance to say Yes. “Wanna take a drive along the shore?” said Ed, and Hayley said Yes before Elaine had a chance to say No.

They drove out along the shore, which was not too crowded at this time of day, so Ed was able to just test the speed limit once in a while to give them some idea of the general point of a Lamborghini. Then they stopped for hamburgers, and Ed bought eight separate Rodeo Deals just so they could instantly collect all eight Rodeo Gals. They went and sat down, and Hayley just sat there with her chocolate milkshake and the eight Rodeo Gals, each in a different cowgal outfit, and she looked all lit up inside.

Elaine had been on lots of dates over the years, and she couldn’t count how many times she’d had to sit there cringing while the guy sat there trying to be nice to Hayley and Hayley sat there being polite and quiet back. She couldn’t think of a single one that knew how to talk to kids, or that Hayley had liked. And now here was Ed not even making an effort, it wasn’t just the fact of the Rodeo Gals, it was the fact that Ed just naturally entered into things from a kid’s point of view. From a kid’s point of view, the whole point of being grown up is that you can afford to get the whole set of a special offer all at the same time, so why would you want to wait? Of course, some men might have had just enough of a glimpse of that to buy the whole set, but they would have been so condescending about it to Hayley that it would have been almost as bad as not buying anything at all. Whereas Ed obviously had the attitude, Who knows when we’ll come back? If we ever do? Who knows if they’ll still have the offer? Let’s get the whole set now just to be on the safe side. In other words, the attitude of a ten-year-old kid.

Now of course, one way of looking at it was that the reason Ed related so well to a ten-year-old kid was that Ed had the mental age of a ten-year-old. And thinking back over some of the stories she’d heard about Ed’s sense of humor, Elaine had to admit there was more than a grain of truth in it. But wait just a minute. This wasn’t some total idiot who couldn’t get his act together, this was the top earner in the company, somebody who had asked for a Lamborghini as a company car and gotten it.

Besides, you can tell something about someone by the way kids respond to them. A kid can usually tell if someone is genuine or full of b.s. If a kid likes someone that tells you something you probably couldn’t find out any other way.

So Elaine sat eating one of the eight Broncoburgers, watching Ed eat fries in a way that suggested his manners hadn’t undergone much of a transformation since he was ten, and relaxing. It felt weird to relax on a date with Hayley around, because usually she was so tense what with sensing all the cross-currents.

Roy, meanwhile, was breaking his golden rule. Roy’s golden rule was that you should never take work home with you. When you leave the office, leave the office, and make sure you leave the office at the office. That was the rule, but Roy was in a quandary, and he had simply not been able to leave that quandary behind when he walked out the door.

Should he tell someone? If so, who?

Not easy questions, and there was no easy answer.