Lightning Rods

AN UNUSUAL SUGGESTION

Although he couldn’t download responsibility onto Lucille’s capable shoulders in the way he would have liked, Joe did continue to benefit from the insights of someone he had identified from the first as one smart cookie. He sometimes suspected that Lucille was not entirely in agreement with the installations as he had originally set them up. The reason he suspected this was that from the first Lucille kept thinking of ways to make the service more to her liking. Unlike the other lightning rods, she never called to cry on his shoulder. Instead she kept calling in with suggestions and advice and comments.

One day he said, “That’s a very interesting idea.”

And he said, “Um, I was wondering. Would you like to have dinner sometime?”

There was a short pause, and then Lucille said, “Sure.”

He said, “Would, um, would Friday suit you?”

And she said, “Fine.”

He picked her up after work and drove to the restaurant. She was wearing a pink suit and pink shoes. Her hair and make-up were immaculate.

They had a table in a quiet alcove of the restaurant where they would be undisturbed.

“So how’s it going?” he asked.

“It’s going just fine,” said Lucille, taking a sip of wine.

“And it’s not giving you any, that is, obviously I do what I can to screen applicants but I have to say I’ve had some girls getting pretty upset.”

“Really?” said Lucille.

“To the point where I wonder if I was optimistic in hoping applicants could approach it in the spirit intended.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Lucille, taking another sip of wine. “The way I see it is, the body is nothing to be ashamed of. Nobody gets excited about a company that provides toilets for the staff. Nobody gets excited if they provide a canteen or a gym. Why shouldn’t they provide for another physical need?”

Joe was staring wide-eyed. This was a really brilliant way of putting the point that had never occurred to him; he could have spared himself a lot of trouble if he’d thought of it.

“Now the way I see it is,” said Lucille, “if you’ll forgive my mentioning when we’re about to eat, say you go to the bathroom and use the toilet. Well, you don’t spend the afternoon dwelling on it, do you? In fact half the time you don’t even think about it while it’s going on, heck, we all know people who read on the john. The way I see it is this is no different. It takes a little longer than using the john, is all. I usually take a magazine to pass the time. Or I might do my nails.”

And now he was staring with his mouth wide open. Lucille was quietly eating her salad. Her nails were immaculate.

Just as well, since he had a delicate subject to bring up.

He said, “Uh, Lucille.”

She said, “Mhm?”

“I’m glad you put it in that perspective,” he said. “Because I want to discuss something with you.”

Lucille took a sip of wine. “OK,” she said. “Shoot.”

“I’ve, uh, I’ve had a request from a client,” he said. “He’s making kind of an issue of it, but frankly none of the people I’ve got in place are really what I’d want to trust with something of this nature.”

“I’m pretty happy where I am,” said Lucille.

“Oh, you’d stay where you are, no question about that. And if you decided you were able to make a contribution to satisfying a valuable client obviously your compensation would be on top of what you’re making now.”

“Keep talking,” said Lucille.

He took a deep breath. There was no way this was not going to be embarrassing.

“I have a request for whipping on the bare butt.”

And then, anticipating misunderstanding—

“His butt.”

Lucille said, “That’s weird.”

“You’re telling me,” said Joe.

“Why would anyone want that?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. The point is, anyway, he’s making an issue of it and if I can make him happy heck that’s fine with me, but you’ll appreciate, well, let’s just say this goes a long way beyond what most of the women who work for us would consider appropriate.”

“What level of remuneration are we talking,” said Lucille.

“I was thinking $5,000 per annum. For a twice-weekly, um, session. As it happens, their conveniences are out by the elevator. You would simply take the elevator to the appropriate floor at the fixed time and go into the Ladies disabled toilet in the usual way, only this time—”

“I get the picture,” said Lucille. “Jesus.”

“I know,” he said. “Ain’t that something?”

“So I’d go there and, what, there’d be a whip in the closet?”

“Exactly, all the equipment would be waiting.”

“Isn’t this going to make a lot of noise?”

“Apparently that’s not a cause for concern.”

“Huh.”

Lucille took another sip of wine, and she said presently, “Look, Joe, I’m not saying I won’t do it. But you know as well as I do that this is beginning to be outside the original parameters which were defined in terms of making a contribution to a single employer. I don’t have to tell you what this is starting to look like. Well, you know as well as I do that $50 a session is an inappropriate figure in the context. You know as well as I do that he would have to pay a lot more for a similar sort of service in a context where he would be running a high risk to satisfy his needs. To put it another way he is getting added value in the fact that this is risk-free and completely confidential, and in my opinion that value ought to be reflected in the remuneration package.”

“What did you have in mind?” he asked.

“$15,000 per annum for two sessions a week. Alternatively, if he would prefer to pay on a per-session basis, $200 a visit.”

Lucille had to basically pick a number out of thin air, since she had no idea what the going rate was for this kind of service in circles where it was not seen as an adjunct to secretarial work. Still, it’s not a bad rule of thumb to demand three times what somebody offers you. In later years, when she had moved on to the more aggressive mores of the litigation lawyer, she found that the rule of thumb had to be revised upward to a factor of ten or twenty—but what she always said was that, though she might have started out on the conservative side, at least her instincts had always been in the right place.

“Well,” said Joe. “Well, I’ll see what I can do.”





CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Years later, when Lucille was making a million a year as a litigation lawyer, she was sometimes asked to identify the thing that had made the single biggest contribution to her career. A lot of women saw Lucille as a role model, because she had started out the way lots of women start out: She had learned to touch type, she had learned a couple of word processing packages and a spreadsheet, and she had worked in an administrative support capacity for eight years, admittedly at increasingly senior levels, before swanning into Harvard Law School with LSATs in the high 170s and swanning out again into the cutthroat, male-dominated field of litigation. What was her secret?

Lucille didn’t say “That’s my secret” because if you say something like that it’s just an open invitation to all and sundry to pry into your affairs. Besides, there’s no point in unnecessarily alienating people.

What she said was that the thing that was the biggest help was the fact that she had taught herself shorthand in tenth grade, even though everybody told her there was no point because most jobs didn’t require it any more. She had practiced shorthand all through high school, and she had kept it up at work even when it wasn’t needed, and when she went to Harvard Law School she was able to get more out of classes because she wasn’t having to scribble at breakneck speed to get everything down. Then every night she made a point of typing up her shorthand notes and making a print-out, as well as saving the notes on disk, with the result that she consolidated the material covered in the lecture. Then when she had to take exams she had already reviewed the material once, and she had typed notes for all her lectures, and she was able to incorporate new material and cross-references into the material she had on disk. So that shorthand everyone told her was a waste of time enabled her to make the best possible use of her time at Harvard Law School, and that was the thing that had made the single biggest contribution to her career.

This is the kind of thing people want to hear from a role model. They want to hear that the role model got where she is today doing something they themselves might well have done, something that maybe isn’t a million miles from something they’re just naturally doing already. Something everybody undervalues that will one day turn out to surprise them.

They don’t want to hear that the thing that made the single biggest contribution was whipping someone on the bare butt twice a week for two years, in a specially equipped disabled stall in the Ladies.

The way Lucille saw it was, most people are not going to get the opportunity to follow up that little tip even if they have the inclination. And nobody is going to come to any actual harm learning shorthand. Nobody is going to find themselves out of their depth following a set of study techniques. They may not end up a hot shot litigation lawyer, but they’ll improve their grade-point average—that’s a heck of a lot more than you can say for most free advice.

The fact is, though, that there’s a heck of a lot more to life than a grade-point average.

Lucille had always been able to keep a cool head in a crisis. She had always had an attention to detail. Those two assets helped her to achieve top scores when she came to take the LSAT. The thing is, though, that the LSAT does not test for the killer instinct. Like it or not, we have an adversarial legal system, and there are areas of that system where someone without the killer instinct is going to get pushed to the wall.

What Lucille realized later, when she got on the litigation track, was this. Attention to detail is important, especially in a big case. But it’s something that can be delegated. The reason good secretaries and personal assistants have attention to detail is that detail can be delegated—it can be delegated to the kind of person who’s good at that kind of job. The killer instinct is something else again. You can delegate anything else, but the killer instinct is not something that can be exercised by proxy.

Well, lots of people realize that sooner or later—but for most people the realization comes too late. Or sometimes people get a glimpse of the truth, but they misunderstand it; they think that having the killer instinct makes you a bad person. But the thing is, it’s not a personal thing. You don’t have to personally hate the opposition. In fact, if your emotions are involved in that way, you’ll probably be less effective than you otherwise would be. Lucille knew this, because by the time she recognized the importance of the killer instinct she had that instinct on call—and that was entirely as a result of her little biweekly extracurricular assignment.

What Lucille realized was that everyone has a little pool of aggression inside them. If you’ve been given the assignment of whipping someone twice a week, and you want to do a good job, you’ve got to draw on that pool of aggression. You’ve got nothing against the guy, heck, you don’t even know the guy. But if you want to do a good job you’ve got to be able to bring that whip down like you mean business; you’ve got to be able to bring a whip down and draw blood, and instead of stopping and saying “Oh, I’m sorry, did I hurt you?” or “Oh, excuse me, was that too hard?” you’ve got to bring it down again just as hard as you did the first time. Or harder.

Well, if you’re in court, or you’re at the negotiating table, you’ve got to be able to draw on that same pool of aggression. You’ve got to be able to mean business. Most women think they mean business if they manage to cause someone a slight stinging sensation—and even then they probably smile and apologize just in case anybody’s feelings got hurt. Until you know what it’s like to draw blood and hit harder the second time you don’t know what it means to mean business. And the thing is, people can tell.

So in the end it was all for the best. But to begin with it was by no means obvious that the experience would be the valuable, career-enhancing opportunity it turned out to be.

Lucille had always thought she was pretty unflappable; her adjustment to life as a lighting rod had only confirmed this. Even so, she had to admit that the experience of applying a whip to a bare butt was quite an eye-opener. It’s not something that secretarial work really prepares you for; you just have to call on your inner resources and hope for the best.

She turned up on the first day not really knowing what to expect. Sure enough, there was a Ladies Room out by the elevators, just as Joe had said there would be. She went in, and it turned out there was just the one stall, adapted for disabled users, and the outer door bolted from the inside. Maybe that was why noise was not expected to be a problem. And sure enough there was a small whip in a cupboard labeled Fire Equipment. There was a button to press to show she was ready to proceed—it had taken her about five months of lobbying Joe to get that one lousy button made standard in all installations. So Lucille pressed the button, and a panel slid open in the wall, and the transporter came through, and sure enough here was the bare butt of the client waiting to be whipped. For reasons best known to himself he had kept his shoes and socks on, so he was wearing well-polished black loafers and black silk socks.

You know, thought Lucille, I don’t care what you say. This is weird.

Well, she thought, look at it this way. Men are strange at the best of times. Some are just stranger than others. And look, it’s his fifteen grand. All I have to do is whip the guy a couple of times a week, for a year, and it’ll be my fifteen grand.

And she raised her arm and brought it down, and she brought the lash of the whip down with it, and it was pathetic.

Lucille gritted her teeth. She was here to do a job.

Come on, she thought. Let’s give the guy his money’s worth.

She raised her arm and brought it down. There was still no noticeable result, so she thought she must be doing something wrong. She raised her arm and brought it down harder. Then she noticed that there were pale weals on the butt where she had hit it the first couple of times. Then they turned red.

After a while she got the hang of it.

He might not be able to sit down for the rest of the day, but he sure as heck got his money’s worth.





THE OTHER 999

Lucille had been coping with the new responsibility for about three months, on top of her regular secretarial and lightning rod duties, when one day she went to the Ladies to freshen her lipstick. She was just blotting her mouth dry when she heard someone sobbing in the height-friendly cubicle.

Lucille hesitated. People used the HFC for all kinds of things—if you ran to work, for instance, it was a good place to change clothes, or if you were going out for the evening you could just change in the HFC. So there was no reason to assume that this was a lightning rod. But what if it was? The problem with any new service is there are a lot of blips and wrinkles that no one could have anticipated, and besides Lucille sometimes wondered if Joe was as rigorous in his selection procedure as he should have been. It was all very well Joe talking about the woman in a thousand, Lucille sometimes thought Joe just hired anyone who walked in off the street who could type, as long as she didn’t have any cellulite and said Yes. The reason she thought it was that after just nine months on the job she knew of at least six other lightning rods in the building, and frankly, if Joe had been doing his job, she shouldn’t have known one.

Before she could make up her mind the door of the cubicle swung slowly open, and a girl from Supplies walked out. Her face was streaked with tears.

“Diane,” said Lucille. “What’s the matter?”

“I’ve done something terrible,” said Diane, dissolving into tears once more. “And now I’ve done it I can’t ever undo it. I can’t ever be someone who never did it.” Tears dripped steadily onto her blouse. “I want to get married, but how can I do a thing like that to Don?”

“A thing like what?” said Lucille.

“Like letting . . . ”

Diane wiped her face with the back of her hand.

“Here, have a tissue,” said Lucille.

Diane dried her face with the tissue.

“I was at my wits’ end,” said Diane. “I didn’t know what to do. All I needed was three credits to complete my physiotherapy qualification and then my mother lost her job and if I didn’t help her she was going to lose her house and I just, it just seemed like everyone was depending on me, and when this opportunity came along at the time it looked like the answer to a prayer.”

“Well, I don’t know what it is you’ve done, or think you’ve done,” said Lucille. “And it’s obviously none of my business. But in my opinion you should just let bygones be bygones. Whatever it is, don’t let it spoil your life. If you’ve met someone you want to spend your life with, just think of that as a fresh start and put whatever it is behind you.”

“Yes, but you don’t understand,” said Diane. “It’s not that easy.” She spat out a description of the lightning rod facility in a way that was only too obviously not the attitude of the woman in a thousand who saw it as no different from holding hands.

Lucille could see she was expected to be shocked and horrified and surprised. Some people might have acted shocked and horrified and surprised just to throw off suspicion; that wasn’t her way. Lucille never bothered to pretend anything she didn’t feel; it was too much trouble. If you’re going to go around trying to provide people with the reaction you think they want you’re going to drive yourself insane. Why bother.

“I see,” said Lucille. “Well, obviously if it hasn’t worked out for you it might be time to quit. It isn’t for everyone. I know quite a few women who’ve tried it, and some of them found it harder to deal with than they expected.”

Maybe that would calm her down. If people went around having hysterics it was going to do the business no good at all.

Diane was staring at her openmouthed. “You know other people who do this?” she said.

“Obviously if you’re thinking of getting married you may want to give it up,” said Lucille.

“But,” said Diane. “How can I do this to Don?”

“Does he think you’re a virgin?” asked Lucille.

“No but—”

“Well then there’s no reason for him to know, is there?”

Diane opened her mouth.

“Look,” Lucille said firmly. “You go to the bathroom every day of your life.”

“Yes but—”

“There’s no secret about it. It’s common knowledge. But you wouldn’t expect to share every little detail with your loved ones.”

“No but—”

”You’re not planning to tell him every time you change a tampon.”

“No but—”

“If you ask me,” said Lucille, “this is a lot less unfaithful than sleeping with someone you know, where Don would have reason to be jealous. Here, you’ve made the physical act about as close as it can get to just going to the bathroom.”

Diane was still crying quietly.

Lucille handed her another tissue, thinking Where does he get them?

The fact was, as Joe could have told her, that there simply weren’t enough qualified applicants to fill the positions.