Lightning Rods

DEPRIVATION

As a frequent flier, Ed was well placed to notice new developments in the lightning rod installations. When PVC was introduced he was not unappreciative. But the fact was, his impromptu date with Elaine had reminded him of just how much of a woman there is above the waist. The more he used the lightning rods, the more he kept remembering how much he was missing.

After that first excursion to Rodeo Bill’s Ed had started inviting Elaine out on a fairly regular basis. For some reason, though, he never seemed to get any closer to making contact. Elaine refused to go out without Hayley on school nights. She refused to stay out late on school nights because Hayley had to do her homework. She refused to let him unbutton one single button in case Hayley came in with a question about her homework.

The fact was that Elaine had given a lot of thought to the discussion on the lightning rod network. And the way Elaine saw it was, providing sexual release for people was part of her job. When she left the office she was off duty, and she could do what she damn well liked. Usually, of course, if she went out with someone for a few weeks, she might start to feel like she should do something, because she would be aware that he was probably getting frustrated. But why should she feel guilty about someone who was already getting an outlet at the office? If someone can get hot meals at the canteen, why the hell should his girlfriend have to cook? Especially if she happens to actually work in the canteen? Besides. Men come and go, but if things go wrong with your kid you can’t just trade in and trade up. No kid wants to worry about coming downstairs in case some guy is getting hands-on experience of her mother’s Wonderbra.

The result was that Ed was getting more frustrated than he would have believed was possible for someone who was using the lightning rods five or six times a day.

Sometimes Ed, Elaine, and Hayley would drive out in the Lamborghini while Ed discovered just how much can be taken in by peripheral vision if a D-cup is lurking in the periphery. Sometimes they would go back to the house and play Scrabble, and Ed would just leave the board to peripheral vision the better to savor the full agony of strictly hands-off experience of a Wonderbra.

Hayley, meanwhile, was gradually accumulating a whole roomful of complete sets of special offers. Every time they went to a fast food outlet Ed would compulsively buy however many meals it took to collect the whole set of whatever it was that happened to be the special offer. It wasn’t too bad if you could pick the remaining, missing parts of the set each time you bought a meal; where it got embarrassing was with the kind of deal where the prize just came in a sealed wrapper that you opened later. Ed would just keep buying meals until the prize turned up. No matter how long it took. They once sat in a Lucky Leprechaun for five hours because they only had four out of a possible five lucky toadstools, free with every purchase of a Magic Meal (just $2.95 with medium-sized drink and medium fries).

One hour to eat the first three Magic Meals, open their wrappers and find they had two out of five toadstools.

Half an hour buying and throwing away another twenty Magic Meals to get a third toadstool.

Half an hour buying and throwing away another thirty Magic Meals to get up to four.

Then Elaine put her foot down. People were starving. It was obscene to be throwing away food like that just to collect a Goddamn lucky toadstool. If Ed wanted to go through with this he could prepurchase however many Magic Meals it took and then eat the meals later.

Three hours of prepurchasing five hundred Magic Meals and going through five hundred wrappers to come up with the fifth and final lucky toadstool.

They never did eat all those prepurchased meals, because Hayley said just the thought of a Magic Meal made her want to puke, and Ed said he felt the same way so he’d just give them to the homeless. So at the time it looked like nearly $1,500 had been thrown away on a stupid plastic toadstool. Which just shows how shortsighted we can be. It turned out that only twenty of that fifth toadstool had ever been made, so that a complete set of lucky toadstools was incredibly rare. Within ten years it was worth $50,000—and that was just one of the complete sets Ed picked up for her when she was ten.

Years later, when Hayley was a millionaire, people used to think the way she got started was through her connections. It was having a stepfather who was a multi-billionaire that made the difference. What Hayley would say was that Ed did two things for her. The first was, he gave her a lot of stuff that got caught up in the collectability craze, so that all those complete sets represented a large capital amount when she was in her early twenties. The second was, he taught her that if you want something, you should just give it everything you’ve got. Don’t worry about looking dumb; don’t worry about what other people will think; just go for it.

What Ed would say was: “She’s a sweet kid.”

What he would think was that he would never have been crazy enough to buy 553 Magic Meals if he hadn’t have been in a state of advanced tit deprivation.

In later years, of course, features were standard which in the early days would have seemed inconceivable luxuries. Today a heater is standard in all cars. Time was when people would heat up a brick in the oven and wrap it in a towel. Today we take car radios for granted; well, the time is still within living memory when, if you wanted a radio in the car, you had to take it out of your living room and put it on the front seat. In the same way, users of the early lightning rods could not have imagined that one day a video panel at eye level would be standard; the idea that you would one day be able to choose between seeing the back and head of a virtual partner, or just getting an eyeful of breasts ranging from mango to melon, would have seemed unthinkable. In the early days users were expected to look after themselves. Soon the Men’s HFC had its own stash of magazines. Then Joe had the bright idea of providing the magazines, because he could get a good deal on bulk orders, and keeping them in a concealed compartment. He tried it out in Kansas City and when it proved popular he made it standard in all his installations, and that, if you can believe it, was what passed for high concept in 2000.

Whether a more sophisticated product would have made life easier for Ed Wilson will never be known. As it was, precisely because Ed Wilson was using the product so much more regularly than most clients, he was one of the first to become dissatisfied with its shortcomings. There comes a time when screwing someone from behind with nothing to look at but the wall gets stale; there comes a time when even screwing someone from behind while reading a magazine does more harm than good. All the magazine does is make you aware of all the features that are inaccessible because there’s a wall in the way.

Studies on the baboon in captivity have shown that primates in captivity take out their frustration on each other. Ed Wilson chose to take out his frustration on Roy.

From the point of view of Lightning Rods, he could not have chosen worse.





A Higher Power





THE BIG BREAK

Ironically, the thing that kicked Joe’s problems into the major league was the very thing that made him think there was now no stopping him, i.e. the fact that he got his first big break.

His first break, obviously, had been when he had found the one company in a thousand prepared to take an innovative approach to the problem of sexual harassment. But that was a break he had had to work for. He had had to write to 1,000 companies, and he had had to handle all the various forms that rejection can take from 999 of them.

But his first big break came through something he had done absolutely no work for at all.

What happened was that Borelco started attracting interest from a big player. Steve had built Borelco up over the years and did not want to see it swallowed whole. In a move to parry the acquisition, he entered into a merger of Borelco with a company about its own size, Namier & Swanson, Inc. Naturally all kinds of finagling had to go on as to how the employment conditions of the two companies were to be made commensurate.

One thing that Steve knew Borelco would have to bring along as part of its culture was the lightning rods, because the men who had grown accustomed to the facility would have bitterly resented being made to give it up after the merger. It would have caused everything to get off to a bad start. But it was not all that easy a subject to raise with the other side.

“Look, Steve,” said Joe, when the difficulty was explained. “If you want my honest opinion, there’s absolutely no point in going out of the way to make trouble for yourself. If you think about it, everybody just takes it for granted that all parties concerned provide toilets for the staff; what’s more, nobody is going to go to the trouble to specify what people are supposed to be doing in the facilities provided. What I suggest is that you simply explain that Borelco has been a pioneer in introducing height-friendly toilets to all its sites; this is a record you’re proud of, and you don’t want it lost in the confusion of the merger. Once the necessary construction has taken place on all former NSI sites you simply explain that you’ve found it most effective to outsource implementation of your sexual harassment policy, and you can leave the rest to me.”

The net result was that they extended the facility to NSI, thus doubling Joe’s business at a stroke.

A by-product of the merger, whose significance Joe was only to understand much later, was that Steve began to appreciate the possible benefits of restructuring, not to say downsizing, human resources. Steve had been finding Roy a pain in the butt for years; now, for some reason, some kind of friction seemed to be developing between Roy and one of the top earners in the company. Might the merger not offer a tactful way of easing Roy out the door? Unfortunately the CEO of NSI had been finding his head of human resources a pain in the butt for years, and he got in first with the ax—unlike Steve he was way ahead of the game, and as soon as the merger was mooted a strategic downsize was the first thing he thought of. So Steve had to not only keep Roy but give him a bigger team to foist blue M&M’s on. He’d lost out this time. But the seed had been planted.

About six months or so after the merger it occurred to someone that BNSI, as it was now called, was now up to the fighting weight of the company which had originally threatened a takeover. So they merged with Vesey Syndicates, forming BNSV, and once again they took the height-friendly toilets and outsourcing of sexual harassment management with them. Then BNSV merged with Sinclair Products, and BNSVS kept the lightning rods, and by now the concept had extended right across the country without Joe having to do a thing.

He didn’t have to do any work at all apart from keeping up the supply. That certainly kept him on his toes, but nothing compared to what would have been involved in drumming up that kind of business from scratch.

Because the thing was, every time there was a merger there would be a complete structural reorganization. People were getting made redundant to here and gone, they had other things on their minds than the realignment of the sexual harassment policy. Plus, if there were some new faces around, people didn’t make much of it because they had other things on their mind. Plus, things were changing all over the place, so no one was going to question something like some construction on the disabled toilets. That was the least of their worries. So unlike the word of mouth referrals, where there was a lot of persuading to do after you got your foot in the door, here a succession of companies were just his for the asking.

By this stage, obviously, Joe was not able to carry the whole show on his own shoulders. He had had to recruit for that person in a thousand who is able to put across an innovative product to people who can be expected to be initially unreceptive or even hostile. He wasn’t looking for hot shots—experience had taught him that this was not a job for prima donnas. He was looking for people with a genuine understanding of the dilemma facing the modern employer. He was looking for people with a genuine understanding of the dilemma facing women trying to put themselves through school, or bring up a family singlehanded. People with a genuine desire to help people resolve those dilemmas.

He was not wholly satisfied with the crew he had signed up so far, but a good businessman makes the best of the material he has to hand. We have to deal with people the way they are, not how we’d like them to be. A good businessman knows that and acts accordingly.

Anyway he had three guys on the sales team, and he had also taken on staff for the recruitment side, so that he was well positioned to take advantage of his big break when it came. The first merger took place just a year after Steve had approved the trial run, and within another two years Joe had installations in all 50 states of the Union.

On the positive side, Joe was never going to have to worry about cash flow again. Besides which, Lightning Rods was now the temporary personnel provider of first resort for one of America’s largest corporations: This gave it a credibility which it had not had when it had only had a few small, relatively obscure clients on its books. People would come to Lightning Rods just looking for a temp. This was all to the good, since it offered further protection against the possibility of ghettoizing bifunctional staff. Not to mention a chance to spread the word if the opportunity presented itself.

On the negative side, Steve had finally succeeded in downsizing Roy out the door. He’d been foiled again after the second merger, when yet again someone else was quicker on the draw and someone else’s albatross was given the old heave-ho. Third time around he knew better. No sooner had forces been joined than Steve made it clear, in subtle ways, that he would not be heartbroken if Roy walked the plank. Joe watched from the sidelines, little guessing that the outcome of the battle had relevance to himself; as far as he was concerned, he didn’t care who ran human resources as long as they didn’t interfere with the temp outsourcing. In this he was making a serious mistake.

Roy put up a good fight, but he knew it was time to quit. He was up to six bags a day; things couldn’t go on like this. So he gave notice, accepted a big pay-off, and went home to brood. For some reason, the incident of a couple of years earlier kept coming back to haunt him. He had nothing to lose now by mentioning it, and one night, when he had had one too many to drink, he happened to mention it to his brother-in-law.

This, too, in itself, might have had no adverse consequences for Joe, but for one thing.

When Walter had left the Army after ’Nam, he had thought at first that he’d had enough of killing people.

Then he’d changed his mind.