Lightning Rods

MISS PERFECT

As any salesman knows, you think you’ve covered all the angles and all of a sudden when you least expect it out of left field comes a boomerang.

One day Joe was sitting in the office waiting for his 11 o’clock appointment, and at 10:58 this black gal came in.

“I’m afraid I have an 11 o’clock appointment,” he said politely.

“I’m a couple of minutes early. I’m Renée.” She held out her hand. He stood up and shook it thinking Shit.

He had advertised for a crème-de-la-crème PA. On the surface of it this might look like unnecessary extravagance: If you use somebody like that as a lightning rod, you’re talking a 100% increase on a $50,000 salary. Whereas if you used a couple of data inputters, say, you’d get twice the coverage for your dollar.

What he’d decided was that this was a shortsighted way of looking at it.

If you talk to people from an older generation, one of the things they comment on is the fact that it’s just not possible to get the same quality of secretary that you could get thirty or forty years ago. Time was you could get a bright gal out of college and she’d get a job as a secretary, sometimes she’d marry and settle down and raise a family, sometimes she’d make a career of it. Well, nobody wants to go back to the days when that was all she could do. If a woman is able to do the same job as a man, why shouldn’t she do it, and get paid accordingly? But the fact of the matter is, it’s had some consequences, and the business world hasn’t really faced up to those consequences.

A man who has worked his way to the top of a multi-million dollar operation needs first-class support. Like as not he’s dealing with an international concern; he needs to be able to delegate to somebody who isn’t looking to take over his job. Time was, he could have gotten that support. Today, the kind of person who would be qualified to give that level of support just isn’t interested. It’s partly the money, and partly the fact that the job isn’t going anywhere.

Well, you can’t do a heck of a lot about the prospects. Trouble is, you can’t do a heck of a lot about the money, either. Because there’s no way shareholders are going to stand still for a secretary making $100,000 a year. Plus, all the guys on the career track in the company are going to get pissed off. Any CEO worth his salt knows a top-drawer PA can make more of a contribution to the company than some jack-ass vice president, but just because you know something like that doesn’t mean you can say it, let alone put your money where your mouth is. One of the first things any manager has to learn is the importance of staff morale.

The result is that sooner or later the PA decides to jump ship. She knows she’s never going to make top dollar, so it’s Sayonara baby.

What he had speculated, anyway, was that if you offered somebody the chance to fulfill that role and make double the going rate, she would find switching over to middle management a lot less attractive.

The other thing was that there was an important principle at stake. It was important that lightning rods should be drawn from every tier of an organization. Because if you start economizing, if you start saying you’re only going to use low-level personnel, sooner or later that’s going to stigmatize that whole branch of employment and you’re going to have a major problem on your hands.

So he had advertised for a personal assistant to a CEO of a major company, and he had made a few appointments, and the first appointment was for 11 in the morning. He had already had a look at the résumé and been impressed. And now in walked this gal.

She was dressed the way you’d expect someone who planned to work at that level to dress. She was wearing low-heeled Gucci shoes, and a beige cashmere dress, and a silk scarf, and a gold watch. He thought Jesus.

“If you’ll just fill out this form,” he said.

She took out a La Cross pen and filled out the form and handed it back to him.

“Thank you,” he said. “And now we’ll just get the skills out of the way. There’s a word processor in the next room. The program will take you through the tests.”

She stood up and walked into the glassed-off cubicle. He could hear a couple of light clicks as she accessed the menu and made her choices. And suddenly it was like a plague of invisible locusts filling the room with their clattering wings. It was like a radio tapdance revival. It was like the dregs of satellite TV, the kind of program that shows 500 simultaneous ping pong matches live, and only on Channel Who Gives a F*ck. It was like, more worryingly, someone typing 100 wpm. With no mistakes.

She took the typing test, and the word processing test, and the spreadsheet test, and the slideshow test. She took the numeric keypad test and the shorthand test. She took the spelling test, and the alphabetizing test, and the grammar test. Then she sent the tests to print, and they printed out on a printer behind Joe’s desk.

Joe pulled a sheet of paper off the printer and looked at it. Typing. Speed: 120 wpm. Errors: 0. Word processing: Points out of a possible 100: 100. Spreadsheet: Points out of a possible 100: 100.

He cast an eye over the remaining tests, which were similarly demoralizing.

“This is very impressive, Renée,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, sitting down again.

“The only thing is, to tell the truth, I’m wondering whether this is really what you’re looking for,” he said.

“I think I’m the best judge of that, don’t you?” said Renée. “Why don’t you tell me something about it?”

“Well, the thing is,” said Joe.

“You’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you?” she said crisply. “You’ve wasted my time bringing me in for an interview, and now you’ve made up your mind.”

“You don’t understand,” said Joe.

“I certainly do understand.”

“I know what it looks like.”

“What does it look like?”

“But it’s exactly the opposite. You’re obviously a very bright gal, I just don’t think you’d be interested in the type of position we’re looking to fill.”

“Indeed,” said Renée. “Well, all I can say is, what it looks like right now is that you’re in flagrant violation of the Equal Employment Opportunities Act.”

“I know that’s what it looks like,” said Joe, “but.”

“What exactly is it in my qualifications that you think makes me unfit for this job?”

Sometimes the best thing you can do is just come right out and tell the truth.

“Let me explain about the job,” said Joe. He explained about the job.

“So as you can see,” said Joe, “with the best will in the world, if we were to hire an African-American the anonymity which is an essential part of the scheme would be destroyed. There’s nothing wrong with your qualifications. On the contrary. But we simply have no means of protecting your anonymity in the way that we can protect Caucasian members of the program. I’m sure you can see that it would be very unpleasant for you to have all the men in the office who had made use of the facility coming up to your desk and knowing that you had provided the facility.”

The face across the desk from him gave him a look that could have turned a man to stone.

“Do you expect me to believe this?” she asked. “Do you expect me to believe a word of this? I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous in my life. If this is the best you can do I can only assume that you have no legitimate quarrel with my qualifications, that you most certainly are in violation of the Equal Employment Opportunities Act, and that the best place to pursue the discussion is in court.”

“Look,” said Joe. “Let’s not do anything hasty. Let me call one of the girls. I’ll have one of the girls come in and explain it to you. Believe me, no one could be sorrier than I am to have taken up your time unnecessarily, and if you like I’ll be happy to reimburse you for the morning’s work. I realize this is all very new, but I can assure you it’s exactly as I’ve said.”

And without giving her a chance to reply he picked up the phone and dialed a number. Lucille answered on the first ring.

“Lucille,” he said thankfully. “Look, I’m in the middle of a crisis. Could you take an early lunch hour and come down to the office?”

“What is this regarding?” asked Lucille.

“I, uh, I need you to confirm to a job applicant that the job is as I’ve described it to her and would not be suitable for an African-American applicant as we would not be able to protect her anonymity.”

“I see,” said Lucille. “In other words, you’re asking me to give up the protection I’m entitled to in order to explain it to someone who doesn’t like the fact that you’ve wasted her time.”

“Uh,” said Joe.

“I assume you’re planning to offer me some sort of compensation?” said Lucille.

“Uh,” said Joe.

“A thousand dollars,” said Lucille.

“What?” said Joe.

“It’s entirely up to you,” said Lucille.

Joe glanced at the job applicant.

“Yeah, yeah, OK,” he said. “Whatever.”

Lucille was there in ten minutes.

“I’ll just leave you ladies to discuss this in private,” said Joe, and he was out of there before you could say Jack Robinson.

Renée sat in the little office and a woman in a pink suit came in and introduced herself. Renée would not have chosen to wear that particular shade of pink, which was too close to bubble gum for her taste, but she had to admit the woman was impeccably turned out.

Renée had initially been skeptical. It had occurred to her that there was nothing to stop the interviewer from just calling someone and getting her to confirm his story. But something in Lucille’s matter-of-fact manner carried conviction.

Lucille explained that the job wasn’t for everyone, and she explained her views on going to the toilet, and she explained that she used tampons and she didn’t tend to dwell on them either, and she explained that she was planning to go to Harvard Law School.

“I never really thought of it before,” Lucille explained. “Because I certainly don’t have that kind of money. But when I first applied to the agency Joe happened to mention that one of the other applicants was saving up money to go to law school. It’s a funny thing, but it really stopped me in my tracks. I thought, ‘What do I want out of life, anyway?’”

Renée was not usually at a loss for words, but somehow “And what do you want out of life?” did not seem exactly the right thing to say.

“Because if what you want out of life is a lot of things, obviously you can get a lot more things if you have more money. I just thought, ‘Is that the kind of person I am? Don’t I have any goals?’ Well, OK, sure, I always thought I’d be PA to the head of a big company one day. I just thought, ‘Is that it?’”

I don’t believe I’m hearing this, thought Renée.

And Lucille explained that just for the heck of it she had gone out and taken the LSAT and she had turned out to have a real aptitude. “And when I thought about it it actually made sense,” said Lucille. “Because attention to detail is one of my strong points.”

“I don’t like debt,” Lucille explained. “I don’t care what qualifications you have, you can’t ever tell what tomorrow will bring. My grandfather lived through the Depression. You can’t tell me there weren’t Harvard lawyers out of a job. Besides, the way I see it is, if you take on a big bank loan other people are calling the shots. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but Harvard will make loan repayments for people who are earning less than $35,000 a year if they do pro bono work. Well, that’s just fine, but what it comes down to is somebody else gets to decide what they think is worthwhile. Besides which, just because that option happens to be available now doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to be available if and when I decide I want to take advantage of it. Well, if I can get around that by going to the toilet a couple of times a day it’s a small price to pay.”

Gradually Renée stopped feeling insulted that someone had had the impudence to try to sell her a disgusting, pornographic fabrication as a reason for not hiring her. Apparently this was actually true. If it was true, it was still disgusting, but it wasn’t an insult that it was the reason she was not eligible for the job.

It simply happened to be in violation of the Equal Employment Opportunities Act.

Now, just because an employer is in violation of the Equal Employment Opportunities Act does not mean you want the job. But Renée had the kind of attention to detail that had been driving her family insane for years, so that she could not help noticing one little detail. The reason the employer was in violation of the Equal Employment Opportunities Act with this particular job was that the whole workplace was one in which an African-American would stand out. In other words, it was the fact that the employer did not have a 50:50 workplace that made it impossible to guarantee anonymity. But what this meant was that not having a 50:50 workplace in effect denied whatever African-Americans did happen to be working there access to positions offering double the salary. They weren’t given the choice. They were just automatically excluded.

In other words, any employer who wanted to implement this program should have simultaneously set the wheels in motion to raise the number of African-Americans in the workplace—regardless of whether any actually wanted the job in question. Probably most would not choose to be involved in a disgusting scheme of this nature, but they should have the opportunity to make that decision for themselves.

Interesting.

Half an hour later Renée walked out of the office building.

Across the street a narrow park ran along the river. Renée crossed the street and sat down on a bench looking over the water.

“Well, what do you think, Renée?”

Renée (or Miss Perfect, as she was known in her family) watched the eddying brown water for a moment in silence.

At last she said, “I don’t know what to think.”

She crossed one leg over the other and looked down at her polished Gucci shoe. The leather was a dark chestnut, gleaming like oiled wood; her leg, in its filmy Hanes pantyhose, was two shades paler, and her cashmere dress was marron glacé. She had twelve other pairs of brown shoes in her closet because it’s important to get the shade exactly right when you are matching earth colors. Some people will wear a pair of tan shoes with an oatmeal dress, or chocolate brown shoes with a red dress; the only thing you can say is, if they’re going to go out looking like that, they’re probably better off not noticing. It’s some kind of consolation to think that most of the people around them won’t notice either.

If you actually care about how you look, on the other hand, you’ll take the trouble to get it right. Sometimes a dress needs matching accessories: sometimes a red dress needs red shoes and a red bag. At other times neutral accessories are called for. But just because something is neutral doesn’t mean it goes with everything, it’s important to get it right. Renée had dyed Italian leather sandals in magenta, coquelicot, chartreuse, peacock blue, lime green, lemon yellow, and frosted orange. She had suede loafers in lavender, lilac, ivory, cream, tangerine, royal blue, charcoal grey, and black. She had ankle boots in three shades of navy blue, four shades of brown, black suede, black leather, and black leather with black suede trim. In addition to the sixty other indispensable pairs of shoes she had a list of things that most people get wrong:

Never wear gold jewelry with blue. If you’re going to wear blue, you need a silver watch. If you can’t afford the watch, don’t wear blue.



Never wear gold buttons.



Never wear coins or medals as buttons.



Never wear fake coins or medals as buttons.



Never wear cloth buttons with a metal rim.



Never wear self-covered buttons in man-made fibers.



Never wear self-covered velvet buttons. Cotton, silk, linen, and wool are acceptable; anything else is in bad taste.



Never wear a belt that ties. If it doesn’t buckle, it shouldn’t be there in the first place.



Never wear anything with a button-down flap.



Never wear anything with a pocket that zips.



Never wear anything with a drawstring.



Never wear anything with epaulettes.



Never wear anything two tone.



Never wear a raincoat that doesn’t match your shoes. You probably need a minimum of ten.





There were about 200 other principles on the list, and even in the fashion magazines people sometimes got some of them wrong. Some people think this kind of thing is trivial; they think as long as they get the important things right the rest doesn’t matter.

The fact is that being perfect is a matter of habit. If you want to get things right, practice by getting everything right. If you always get everything right, down to the last detail, when the important things come along you’ll be ready for them. Otherwise, you waste more time than you save wondering whether something is worth taking the time to get right. And even if you decide it is, you won’t know how to get it right if you try.

Miss Perfect had been perfect ever since she could remember. Her clothes were always folded, sorted by color, and put away. Her toys always looked as good as new. Her schoolbooks had paper jackets to protect them. Her notebooks were always pristine, filled with notes that fell automatically into perfect outlines in perfect handwriting. Her homework was always on time, and it always got an A. College was the same, and so was every job she had ever had. That was why she was ready to be PA to a CEO at the age of 28.

“I don’t know what to think,” she said again, clasping her hands around her knee and looking at her beautifully manicured thumbnails, and thinking of the fact that Lightning Rods was in flagrant violation of the Equal Employment Opportunities Act.

Renée sat on the bench, swinging her shoe.

This detail was going to go on niggling at her. She could tell. All details niggled at her. Sometimes she thought she would rather not have to find closet space for 100 pairs of shoes; she didn’t want to own shoes in twenty-two separate shades of navy blue. But if her shoes were wrong for her dress the color just niggled at her and niggled at her and niggled at her until she gave in and bought another pair. If a button was loose on a blouse it niggled at her. If her watch didn’t agree with the talking clock, it niggled at her. This was going to just go right on niggling at her.

“You need a lawyer,” she said, but something was niggling at her.

The thing that was niggling at her was the calm, confident way Lucille had shared her ambition to go to Harvard Law School.

The thing that was niggling at Renée was the fact that all these things were niggling at her. Because if you have the type of mind that is simply not able not to notice details maybe you don’t need a lawyer.

Maybe you could be a lawyer yourself.

Renée had noticed for years that the people running the country did not bring the level of perfectionism to the task which she brought to organizing name tags for a conference. The problem was that to do the job the way she would want to do it would drive even her insane. She had enough trouble just organizing a conference to her own satisfaction.

She swung her foot back and forth.

The fact is that not being able to not pay attention to detail can actually be a liability. Just because Renée was not able to not pay attention to every single little detail did not mean she thought it was actually worth it. Au contraire. Sometimes it got really irritating. That was why she had decided to apply for a new job. It wasn’t just the money, though the money was part of it. She had thought maybe a job that was more of a challenge, that carried more responsibility with it, would justify the level of perfectionism she would not be able to help bringing to it.

Well, wasn’t it just possible that the reason she kept looking for new jobs was that she was not doing the kind of job that would ever justify the level of perfectionism she brought to a job? Wasn’t it possible that the kind of job that would justify that level of perfectionism was always going to be one where you couldn’t avoid making some mistakes? Maybe the time had come to learn to live with that. Instead of looking around at the way other people were running the world, and letting it niggle at her, she could do something about it. Go to Harvard Law School. Become a Justice of the Supreme Court. All you had to do was look at the job the current appointees were doing to see where there was real scope for improvement.

“I think you’re getting a little carried away here, Renée,” she said.

A dog trotted by. It squatted in the grass and squeezed out a long, narrow, soft brown turd, then trotted gaily away.

Renée looked at the turd in the grass.

Suppose someone offered you the chance to go to Harvard Law School, and all you had to do was pick up a turd a couple of times a day, wearing plastic gloves, on top of your regular job. It would be kind of disgusting, but no worse than cleaning toilets. She had taken a part-time job as a chambermaid when she was fifteen to save up and buy a computer; did she have any regrets? No way.

The difference would be that you would be getting a chance to have a completely different life. Wouldn’t you do something kind of disgusting for a couple of years to have a chance you wouldn’t otherwise have? You know you would.

“I think we’re talking about something rather different here, Renée,” she said.

Suppose someone offered you the chance to go to Harvard Law School, but you had to do something really disgusting for two years. Suppose you had to agree to shovel out a stable all day long for two years. Two years of shoveling horse shit and at the end of it you could go to Harvard Law School. Or what if it was something even more disgusting? Suppose you had to work for two years at a sewage disposal plant. Two years of shoveling human shit and at the end of it you could go to Harvard Law School, no strings attached.

At the end of the day, you’re just talking about pieces of the planet. Your body is a piece of matter on the surface of the planet. The shit is also matter. You use one object on the surface of the planet to move around other stuff on the surface of the planet. And what you buy with moving all that stuff around is the use of your mind.

If you’re a personal assistant, chances are you won’t have to deal with anything that’s physically disgusting. You can leave that to the cleaners. Or at least, you can leave most things to the cleaners. If you’re the type of person that things niggle at, you will probably find yourself cleaning your keyboard with a toothbrush, or noticing that there is some kind of disgusting gunk on the phone that will have to come off. But by and large the job is not offensive to the senses.

On the other hand, you have to clutter up your mind with a lot of stuff that you might well prefer not to give house room. That’s always going to be part of the job; you are never going to reach a stage where you can clear the decks and focus on major issues. And the fact is, plenty of people who go to law school are no better off. They come out with these loans to pay off, and before you know it they are counting themselves lucky to be cluttering up their minds with tax loopholes.

You could argue that a deal that asks you to do something physically disgusting for a limited period, and gives you free use of your own mind in exchange, is actually not such a bad bargain.

You could argue that the type of person who could come up with this kind of argument is wasted outside the law.

Renée stood up suddenly. She had noticed a small pharmacy on the ground floor of the building. She crossed the road again, and in the pharmacy she bought a pair of plastic gloves.

She returned to the park. The turd lay undisturbed in the sweet young grass. She drew on both gloves, and she picked up the turd in her right hand and went back to sit on the bench. She crossed one leg over the other, resting her arm on her knee. Her hand in its plastic glove rested on the cashmere of her skirt; the turd reposed in the plastic-gloved palm of her hand.

She sat looking at it coolly.

If you are fastidious you actually spend a lot more time than other people dealing with things that disgust you. Most people don’t notice their surroundings; they don’t notice a thin film of soap around the bathtub, they don’t notice the streaks of dirt on their windows after it rains, they don’t notice the flecks of grease on their stove or the grime in the cracks at the bottom of their trash can. They don’t have to deal with things that disgust them because hardly anything does. As long as they have a toilet that flushes and a shower that works they think they’re living in a clean environment. But if you’re fastidious you notice all this stuff that nobody else sees, and you have to deal with it on a daily basis. Because you know one thing for sure. If you don’t deal with it, nobody else is going to.

At last she stood up. It was as if her body knew what she wanted to do better than she did. It walked to a disposal unit that said “Pet Waste Only” and it lifted the lid and dropped the turd inside. Then it walked to a unit that said “Litter” and it peeled off the plastic gloves and dropped them in. Then it turned and crossed the street and went back into the building.