Lightning Rods

EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES

Joe introduced the PVC enhancement to all his operations. He gave Renée a placement as a bifunctional crème-de-la-crème PA. He put LIGHTNING RODS IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES EMPLOYER on all his ads. And in his innocence he thought all his problems were over.

In fact, his problems were just beginning.





A Fine Romance





TIME MANAGEMENT

Renée prepared for the new job the way she prepared for everything—thoroughly.

The way Renée looked at it was this. You were selling use of your body for short periods of time in exchange for the chance to make the best possible use of your mind. Well, why not take it one step further? Why not set aside the actual time allocated for non-secretarial functions and put it to use? Learn a language? Study accounting? Do something with the time, so that at the end of a year, say, you’d look back and what you’d see was that you’d worked on a language a couple of times a day. On top of being paid for the time, you’d have a new asset that no one could take away from you.

She spent quite a lot of time thinking about which particular project would give her a real sense of achievement. What she finally decided was that this was the ideal opportunity to read Proust’s masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu, in French. The amount of time lightning rods were typically expected to be on duty would be just right for working through a French text. On the one hand she wouldn’t be reading a lot at any one time, so she wouldn’t get discouraged. On the other hand, it was quite a long book, so by the time she finished she’d probably have enough money for Harvard Law School. She could look at the volumes on her shelf and see how far she had to go.

So she went to the university bookstore and bought the complete set, and she started at page one, paragraph one on her first day on the job.

Sure enough, the idea worked perfectly. The fact that she had to struggle with the French meant she didn’t have a lot of attention to spare for anything else that might be going on. She’d go through as much text as she could, underlining words she didn’t know with a pencil. At night she’d look up the words and read through the passage again. The next day she’d read on. Within a month she was having to look up fewer words. Within six months she was reading the French almost as well as she read English—and that was entirely the result of doing it on a daily basis.

So unlike most lightning rods she was able to look at something she’d actually accomplished with the time. It was no different from reading a book while you have a massage, or a jacuzzi, except that she’d done it on a daily basis for six months. Instead of cluttering up her mind with bad feelings, she had actually improved her mind. And by the time she reached the end of A la recherche du temps perdu she’d have earned $100,000 just out of time spent reading Proust.

Pas mal.

Years later, when Renée was making constitutional history as a Supreme Court Justice, she was sometimes asked to identify the thing that had made the single biggest contribution to her career.

A lot of women saw Renée as a role model, and a lot of African-Americans saw Renée as a role model, here was someone who had worked in subordinate positions for years, admittedly at increasingly senior levels, before swanning into Harvard Law School with LSATs in the high 170s and swanning out again to glide with apparently effortless ease right on up to the Supreme Court. What was her secret?

Renée didn’t say “That’s my secret” because in her opinion coyness was in bad taste.

What she said was that there was no one single thing, but she made a point of doing things right first time. Effective time management was also important.

She did not say that there’s nothing like being on the receiving end of a proactive sexual harassment management program for letting you in on a big secret.

No matter how mundane and routine the job in hand, most people don’t know what they’re doing half the time. If they’re setting up something new that’s never been tried before, you can make that 98.2 % of the time. It’s only when you’re in on something from the beginning, when staying in the air for 12 seconds counts as heavier-than-air powered flight, that you understand just how much is left to do. Something leaves the drawing board and the spectators cheer when it crashes into the sand, because at least 12 seconds elapsed before the crash. Naturally enough, the inventors think they’ve really achieved something if they can move on to just keeping it in the air without crashing. Naturally enough, if they break that 12-second barrier, all kinds of faults get overlooked in the excitement.

What Renée realized was that exactly the same thing applied to the country as a whole. It was set up from scratch by people who managed to overlook minor details like slavery and a whole sex. Naturally enough, with that level of glaring oversight to fix, it was easy for people to overlook the faults that remained. Because the thing is, we grow up with the laws we’ve got, and we assume they’re right because they’re what we’re used to. What we don’t realize is that some of those laws were written by people like Joe, and the rest were written by people trying to clean up after people like Joe. That’s why they leave a lot to be desired.

What Renée realized was that the more important something is, the less likely people are to fix mistakes. They’re going to assume that if it’s that important, somebody must have known what they were doing. Or they’re going to assume that anything seriously wrong would have been fixed after all this time. They’re not going to realize that the people who set it up didn’t know what they were doing 98.2% of the time. They’re not going to realize that the people who fixed it were just trying to bring it into line with an acceptable, 50% level of cluelessness. So if something leaves a lot to be desired, it’s up to you to do something about it. Because if you don’t, you know one thing for sure: nobody else is going to.

That simple piece of knowledge gave Renée the determination that carried her all the way to the Supreme Court. Pas mal.

And in addition to letting her in on the big secret, Lightning Rods also gave her the opportunity to put that newfound knowledge into practice.

Joe would have been the first to admit that Renée was a real asset to the firm. In fact, he had to mentally retract all the harsh things he had thought about the Equal Employment Opportunities Act. Because the fact was, his first impulse had been to take the easy way out and tell the applicant to go elsewhere. It was only because he had been legally obligated to come up with a solution that he had gone to the trouble and expense of introducing PVC.

As it turned out, the PVC alone was a real improvement on the product. It solved the perennial problem of inappropriate urination. It enhanced the enjoyment of most participants in the program. Also, he had hired a truly exceptional applicant. And if it hadn’t been for the Equal Employment Opportunities Act all that talent would have been squandered.

The only thing was, Renée seemed to be even more demanding than Lucille. Not a day passed without Renée calling up to make comments and recommendations. Usually when a lightning rod made a suggestion Joe would promise to make a note of it and give the matter careful consideration. He tried this once with Renée.

“And when can I expect to see some action taken?”

“Uh, I can’t really say before I’ve had a chance to think about it in greater depth,” said Joe.

“When do you expect to have a chance to think about it? Tonight? Tomorrow?”

“Uh . . . ”

“I’ll give you a call tomorrow afternoon. I don’t see any reason why this shouldn’t be resolved by next week.”

Joe had never realized that a crème-de-la-crème PA had so much in common with a bulldozer.

He had then tried his other tried-and-true response, which was to explain that the suggestion could not be implemented on the software in its present form, but that he would do everything in his power to integrate it into the software the next time he updated the program.

“And when will that be?”

“Uh . . . I’m not sure. I’ve got a lot of commitments, so I’m not exactly sure when I’ll be able to get around to this. But I’ll certainly do it just as soon as I’ve got a moment to spare, I can assure you of—”

“Do you mean to say that you do the programming yourself?”

The fact was that Joe was too embarrassed to hand it over to a computer expert, who would be bound to look at what had been done so far and sneer.

“I prefer it that way,” said Joe. “I developed the product, and it works best if enhancements are introduced by someone who knows it inside out.”

“Well, there’s something to be said for that, of course, but this is pretty urgent. Can’t you just do it this weekend?”

“I don’t think this is something that can be done in a weekend,” Joe said firmly. “It’s pretty complicated stuff.”

“Really? It looks pretty straightforward to me. What language are you using?”

“Just English for the time being,” said Joe. “We don’t really have enough Hispanic clients at this stage to justify bringing it out in Spanish. Though obviously, should the need arise, Lightning Rods will be ready and willing to meet that challenge.”

There was a short silence.

“I mean what programming language are you using,” said Renée.

“Oh. Oh, right,” said Joe. He mentioned the name of the program.

“Then it shouldn’t be a problem. I’m familiar with the basics, anyway. I’ll come in this weekend and deal with it. I’ll expect to be paid overtime, obviously.”

“Uh . . . ”

“Fifty dollars an hour. Anything else I need to know? Good, then that’s that taken care of.”

After that Joe just gave up and allowed himself to be bulldozed over on a daily basis until the system met Renée’s exacting requirements. It cost him about $5,000 in overtime for all the programming. But when the dust settled he realized it had actually been worth it. It was like getting the Princess and the Pea to design a mattress. Once Renée had smoothed out all the little wrinkles in the system that bothered her, the final result was something that made the whole spectrum of lightning rods happier. Phone calls to the office dropped right down. Joe even began wondering whether he really needed that counsellor.

Unfortunately one of Renée’s innovations, while invaluable in itself, was to have far-reaching and dangerous repercussions.

Renée was irritated from the first day by the unprofessional approach of her fellow lightning rods. For one thing, there was a stash of magazines in the HFC. For another, twice in one week she came in and found someone’s PVC just lying on the floor where somebody had just left it instead of disposing of it properly. For another, nobody seemed to worry all that much about the anonymity which was supposed to be an integral part of the program. She was only 20 pages into Du côté de chez Swann when she spotted her first other lightning rod. By page 40, she could identify no fewer than 10.

One of the main reasons seemed to be that many of the lightning rods should never have been hired in the first place. Instead of managing their time so that their minds were otherwise occupied they seemed to dwell on the physical aspects of the job in a way that was bound to lead to trouble. Sooner or later they’d get depressed, feel a need to confide in someone. They’d bottle it up inside, see someone coming out of the HFC, jump to conclusions, assume it was another lightning rod, feel the urge to come out. Well, if they had to talk about it the last people they should be talking to were people in their own company.

Renée tried to get Joe to do something about it, and Joe just tried to avoid the issue.

At last she’d had enough. “Look, Joe,” she said firmly after Joe had avoided the issue for about five minutes. “This is completely unacceptable. You can’t tell me your clients wanted this kind of working environment. You promised them complete anonymity at every level; well, right now anonymity is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese. Clearly members of the program need more support from the company than they’re currently getting.”

Joe tried to interrupt but Renée proceeded implacably on. “Now, in my last job, as PA to the Senior Vice President, I also oversaw an in-house online network for support staff. Staff could raise any problems they were experiencing in a forum where other members of staff could respond; at the same time, if I saw any issues related to performance that needed addressing, I could raise those issues at an early stage. There’s absolutely no reason why something similar should not be put in place for the entire lightning rod network. Since I’ve had experience of setting up and running something like this in the past, I’m prepared to take this on—design the software, organize installation and supervise the network. My guess is that most difficulties can be resolved internally; anything we can’t deal with can be referred to the parent organization.”

“Uh . . . ”

“I’ll want another $15,000 a year on top of what I’m getting now. At the end of the first year I’ll let you know if that needs to be revised upward.”

“Uh . . . ”

“Good, then that’s settled.”

Renée set up the network. She introduced a magazine compartment within the transporter. She laid down the law on such matters as correct disposal of skirts and PVC cladding. She gave the lightning rods a forum in which to air their views. And every so often she would offer tips of her own.

If Renée had stuck to advising people to learn a language in their spare time, Joe could have gone on sleeping the sleep of the just. But one day, when Renée was nearly halfway through Du côté de chez Swann, the question came up of the effect of the job on people’s relationships. Many lightning rods said that the job made them less interested in sex outside work, and that it sometimes had a negative effect on their relationships. One said her boyfriend was always complaining, because he worked in the same company and he knew she wasn’t working that hard so he couldn’t see why she was always tired.

Renée pointed out that if her boyfriend worked in the same company, the company was providing an outlet for his needs. There was absolutely no reason for his girlfriend to feel guilty. Renée had meant to be supportive, but it generated a lot of controversy, because the lightning rod said if she thought her boyfriend was using the facility she would never be able to think of him the same way again.

As it happened, Elaine sometimes checked out the network, and she thought the network facilitator had made a good point.

In fact, it made Elaine see her work as a lightning rod in a whole new light.

What Elaine thought was that a lot of men in relationships were probably using the facility, and if you thought about it just having that facility could make a relationship stronger than it otherwise would be. One of the things that can put a strain on a relationship, after all, is the fact that men tend to equate a relationship with sex on demand. Well, if they can actually have that sex on demand in the workplace, it stands to reason they should be able to keep that demand under control in other contexts. It stands to reason that the relationship is less likely to be damaged by demands for sex at inappropriate times and in inappropriate contexts. It stands to reason that the relationship will stand a better chance of success.

The point made a big impression on Elaine. And having made an impression on Elaine, it also had an impact on Ed Wilson.