Lightning Rods

GENIUS STRIKES AGAIN

Joe had thought of an idea so audacious only a genius or a lunatic could have come with it.

The idea was, what if it had been a mistake to concentrate initially on a secular environment?

Events were to prove that he was no lunatic.

He’d made a mistake. A big mistake.

But it took genius to recognize that mistake.

To be fair, sales is all about targeting.

It’s a numbers game.

Target, target, target, target.

Some people are always going to say no.

Now a good salesman can turn that no into a yes. Granted. The question is how long you have to spend turning a no around. A good salesman picks people who are likely to say yes without wasting his time.

Well, in his innocence, he had imagined that a highly Christian environment would not be amenable to the type of product he had to offer.

He said later that he could look back and weep.

One thing you learn in sales is never take anything for granted.

He was a long way from reaching saturation in the type of organization he started out on, but one thing you learn in sales is to look ahead.

Time doesn’t stand still.

Four years ago he had had the field all to himself; now suddenly out of a clear blue sky he had El Cheaparooney to contend with. It was time to move on to pastures new.

Well, if there was one segment of the market where El Cheapo didn’t have a hope in hell of finding takers, it was in that part of the country where people care about family values.

So he approached a couple of companies that he had left off his initial list.

What he did was he made most of the points he usually made, but he left out the material about the baboon.

Instead he made the point that a girl who has been brought up in a Christian home should not be subjected to inappropriate behavior and led into temptation at the office. A business has an obligation to protect the purity of its female staff. At the same time we are dealing with fallible human beings. A man may try to do right but fail. A business has an obligation to protect the men on its staff who while trying to follow Christ’s path suffer the weakness of the flesh. Which is better: to leave a man to consort with prostitutes, endangering his health and that of his family, endangering his reputation—knowing that if he is discovered the disgrace will ensure that the downward path is swift and sudden! Or to provide an outlet, a hygienic outlet for those carnal frailties?

Joe had been arguing of late, to clients in the secular community, that untold man-hours were being lost to the scourge of cyberporn, thereby making the physical release offered by Lightning Rods an indispensable safeguard to productivity. The argument proved surprisingly adaptable to the Christian setting.

“Remember,” he would say, “he that commits adultery in his heart has committed adultery as much as if he had done the deed. But a man who is afflicted by impure thoughts is drawn back again and again to the source of the poison. Is it not better that a man should commit a single impure act, in a couple of minutes, than that he should stain his thoughts with impurity for hours at a time? Is it not better, if he cannot resist temptation, to fornicate once in the flesh than a hundred times in the heart?”

With these words did he persuade both of the companies he approached. He was then able to tell new prospects that he knew of at least two companies with a strong commitment to Christian values which had implemented the scheme.

“Look at Mary Magdalene,” he would say. “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.”





AND AGAIN

Now it was in the course of his dealings with the Christian community that an idea came to him that was breathtaking in its simplicity.

It goes without saying that the vast majority of firms with Christian values were always going to be hostile to a scheme which accepted man’s fallen nature and tried to do something about it. You’ve got to expect that when you’re dealing with a fundamentally conservative group of people. He obviously had to feel his way very carefully, going by hints that people threw out, the odd name dropped in seemingly casual conversation. By and large he managed to steer clear of firms where there was nothing doing, and to zero in on the ones where he stood some chance of success. But as every salesman knows, you can’t win ’em all.

He had an appointment one day with a man who according to the scuttlebutt was a likely prospect.

For some reason the man did not respond as expected. He just kept staring at Joe.

“Is this true?” he said at last.

“Scout’s honor,” said Joe.

“I never heard of such a thing,” said the man.

“Well, obviously it’s quite a new concept,” said Joe. “It runs the risk of being misunderstood. Confidentiality is one of the things we guarantee our clients. That’s why, to all outward appearances, my agency is just like any other employment agency.”

“And people use you? You’ve been in business a long time?”

“Four years,” said Joe. “Long enough for copycats to spring up all over town. If I could just make this one point, it’s especially important for a Christian firm to not settle for cheap imitations. Sure you can get cheaper, but money isn’t everything. I don’t need to tell you that the ideal of Christian forgiveness and charity can sometimes seem to be more honored in the breach than the observance, as it says in the Lord’s Prayer, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us, but if somebody gets known to have sinned the attitudes of his fellow sinners can sometimes be the biggest obstacle to getting back on the upward path.”

Jim avoided his eyes. Up to this moment Jim had probably been hoping that Joe hadn’t heard about him; now he was probably guessing that he probably had.

“Now the copycats, to offer the prices that they offer, can only make a profit by using the very cheapest materials. Mexicans, Nicaraguans, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but you see what I’m saying. And believe you me, that’s what we’re talking. Whereas Lightning Rods has always made it a policy to use only the highest quality of staff. Which means you’re not going to have a lot of people wandering around the place who are going to attract attention. They’ll look just like the people you’ve already got on your staff.”

“But in that case,” said Jim. “You mean…you mean there’s no way to tell?”

“That’s exactly what I do mean,” said Joe.

“This is dreadful,” said Jim. “I knew things were bad, but I didn’t know they were that bad. What is the country coming to?”

Joe was already listening philosophically, waiting for the interview to end. If you’re a salesman you can tell when a lead isn’t going anywhere.

“I have a twenty-year-old daughter, just moved up to New York,” said Jim. “I didn’t like the idea a whole lot to begin with. Now for all I know she’s working in this sort of environment—”

“Well, if she is, she’ll probably be finding she’s treated with a lot more respect than she would be in offices that haven’t made an installation,” said Joe. “Which is just the point I was trying to make just now.”

“As far as I’m concerned, I’d be willing be pay over the odds just to have a guarantee that a scheme of this kind wasn’t in place,” said Jim.

And that was when Joe had his brilliant idea. “Well, Jim,” he said, “if I should happen to hear of such a company I’ll be sure and let you know.”

Joe went back to his motel. The slight disappointment about losing the sale was more than compensated for by his excitement over his new idea, which had the simplicity of genius.

The new idea was this. Suppose you offered a firm the chance to outsource its whole human resources department to an independent contractor—a contractor which guaranteed its staff provision to be 100% lightning rod free. America is a country which accommodates a wide range of perspectives—there were bound to be people out there who would prefer to work in a guaranteed lightning rod free environment, whether because they had been brought up by religious fundamentalists or whatever. Well, where there are people with a fanatical preference you know there’s got to be money in it.

Five years ago there would have been no market in catering to that preference, because the actual concept of the lightning rod protected workplace did not exist. He had created an opening for a product, he had turned into a marketable product something people had previously just taken for granted, just by bringing into existence the opposite of that product! Well, if an opening for a product has arisen, entirely thanks to you, it’s only fair that you should be the first to profit from it.

Of course, some people would probably argue that there were plenty of reputable employment agencies already in existence that never had gotten involved in the provision of lightning rods and never would. Anyone who wanted to steer clear of proactive sexual harassment prevention could just go to Manpower or Kelly or whatever and know they had absolutely nothing to worry about.

That just showed how little they knew. Sure, you can go to Manpower and get the type of product they’ve been providing all along. But what you’re not going to get is the type of safeguard that someone who’s been in the lightning rod business from the ground up is automatically going to build into a product.

Because look. If you’re going to offer a cast-iron guarantee that no physical outlet will be provided for drive-orientated individuals, and believe you me there are just as many of those among the Christian community as anywhere else, a responsible employer has to ensure that those employees are protected in some other way.

Well, say a young woman for whatever reason doesn’t like the idea of working in a firm where there are lightning rods on the premises. She doesn’t object to provision being made for one kind of physical function, she doesn’t get up in arms about the fact that there are toilets in the building, but for whatever reason she doesn’t care for other types of physical function being provided for. Fine.

In that case there’s absolutely no reason why she wouldn’t be willing to make some concessions to a firm that was prepared to offer the kind of environment she wants to work in. As a safeguard to the firm that has made an offer of that kind, at no small risk to itself, she should be prepared to sign a waiver certifying that no sexual harassment charges will be filed against individuals or the firm if some form of behavior takes place which would not have taken place if a physical outlet had been provided.

To put it another way, a firm that has an anti-lightning rod policy owes it to itself to hire the type of employee who is prepared to offer it that kind of safeguard in exchange for the more conservative type of working environment provided.

Which is where an employment agency with an affiliate in the lightning rod side of the business has such an edge. If you’ve spent as much time as Joe had talking to people recoiling in horror and revulsion at the very idea of a lightning rod, you couldn’t help but know there was a definite market for a product that guaranteed staff would never even have the possibility of rubbing shoulders with one. No two ways about it, it had been stressful at the time—it’s discouraging to lose a sale at the best of times, let alone get the kind of looks people give you if you have transgressed one of their socio-sexual taboos. But it meant he now knew just how strong the feelings were that the original product aroused; he knew just how many people out there would think no sacrifice too great to avoid using it.

Well, if people feel that strongly about something, you know there’s got to be money in it. Manpower and Kelly and the more conventional agencies didn’t even know there was something to feel strongly about.

What it meant was that he had an edge. There was going to be a window of opportunity, just when lightning rods started to be publicly known and public feeling would run high, when a firm that had thought through the implications of the LRF office would be well positioned to pick up the ball and run with it.

Joe walked up and down his motel room. “Joe,” he said, “I really think you’re on to something.”

He walked up and down grinning and thinking Boy oh boy oh boy.

The beauty of it was, of course, that it would consolidate his position as a defender of family values. People would see that all he was trying to do was make the world a better place. Because whatever people may tell you, money isn’t the only thing in life. And the beauty of it was, no matter how you looked at it, he was going to make one heck of a lot of money.

He decided to call Domino’s to order in a pizza.

If you want to be a rich man, you need to be able to do two apparently contradictory things. On the one hand, you need to be able to operate at the level of people with a lot of money without losing your cool. Good restaurants, fine wines, fast cars—you need to be able to look like you take that for granted. But on the other hand, you can’t afford to get cut off from your roots. Because at the end of the day it’s ordinary people, with all their strengths and limitations, that wealth is based on. If you lose sight of that, you won’t have your money for long.

“You know what,” he said pacing up and down, waiting for the pizza to arrive. “I actually think this unexpected competition is a good thing. Because if this guy hadn’t come along I would probably have just gone along getting stuck in a rut, instead of opening up new markets. The way I look at it is, the guy has actually made me a present of two totally new markets that a guy like that is in no position to exploit.”

He walked over to the window and opened the curtain.

The motel had been built fairly recently by an exit off I-95. From where he stood, he could have been looking out on anywhere in the country. He could see a McDonalds, and a 7-Eleven, and a Waffle House, and a TCBY.

Every single one of those represented an idea that someone had had to have, an idea whose value had probably been far from obvious at the time. When did they actually start having 7-Elevens, anyway? At one time having a store that was open from 7 in the morning to 11 o’clock at night had been a real innovation, something no one had thought of before. People had probably said “Why would anyone pay those kind of prices at 11 p.m. when all they have to do is wait and go to the grocery store the next day? Or fine, maybe people might go if they’re desperate, but how’s a store supposed to survive on its takings between 7 and 9 a.m. and 6 and 11 at night?” Well, the answer is before you, buster.

Or take a Waffle House. Probably when someone came up with the idea everybody had scoffed and said nobody is going to want to eat waffles after 11 a.m. at the absolute latest, who ever heard of eating waffles throughout the day?

There’s nothing like the feeling that you’ve had an idea that everyone expected to fail, and gone and made a success of it. And yet it’s funny to think how big a part luck plays in these things.

If I hadn’t walked to the 7-Eleven that day and seen that heron, I might be selling vacuum cleaners to this very day, he thought.

“You’ve been lucky so far, Joe. You’ve already succeeded at what you set out to do. But don’t ever take that for granted. There’s bad luck as well as good in this world. You can’t afford to rest on your laurels.”

The sky was darkening, but it was not yet dark. In the west the molten gold of the setting sun slipped through the hills, and in the darkening hollow the yellow arches and the 7-Eleven and the Waffle House and the TCBY were glowing in the golden light. High above a flock of geese sped southward in a V formation, and on the highway the cars and trucks sped north and south.

He remembered standing on a beach in early morning watching the pelicans. A pelican does what it’s designed to do. A sandpiper does what it’s designed to do. A goose instinctively heads south in a V-formation in a V formed of other geese instinctively heading south. It doesn’t check out the beach and experiment with a sandpiper lifestyle. It does what it’s designed to do.

The thing about animals, though, is that they live in this incredibly beautiful world without noticing. It can be the most beautiful morning since the world began and a bird will be out there going after worms, oblivious to the beauty that surrounds us. Whereas a human can just stop the car and get out and look around and think What am I doing with my life?

We all have a choice, thought Joe. Every single one of us has a choice. Look at all those hundreds of people driving up and down I-95. Every single one of them could pull over to the side of the road. There’s nothing to stop someone pulling over to the side and looking around at this beautiful sunset and choosing to follow a different path.

What he thought was, An animal can’t decide to be a better animal. It doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong, so maybe there’s no such thing as being a better animal. It just has to do what comes instinctively. Whereas sometimes what comes instinctively for a human can be actually wrong. That’s why it’s important to remember that there’s more to life than being a success. Sure, if you do something it’s important to give it your best shot. But it’s also important to be a good person. You can’t ever take that for granted either.

“Look at Ian,” Joe told himself. “Here’s a guy who never did anybody any harm, one day he’s just sitting on the bus minding his own business, looking forward to reading page three of The John Foster Dulles Book of Humor, and out of the blue some guy from Keene, New Hampshire asks him a question and gratuitously makes an allusion to his size. Instead of making an offensive reply right back, which would have been only too easy to do, the guy just quietly answers the question. If that’s not turning the other cheek, I don’t know what is. The fact is, he’s a better person than I am. By a long shot. I may have done something to raise public awareness of the need for height-friendly facilities, but I’ve got a lot of work to do on myself. A lot of work.”

He stood looking out. TCBY, 7-Eleven, and the Waffle House were now in shadow.

Suddenly—whether by accident or through the mysterious workings of some higher power—he felt the need to take a leak.

He walked into the bathroom, and a big grin broke out on his face. A sign on the wall said: FOR YOUR COMFORT AND CONVENIENCE WE HAVE INSTALLED AN ADJUSTA™ HEIGHT-FRIENDLY TOILET. FOR MAXIMUM SAFETY IN USING THE ADJUSTA™, PLEASE FOLLOW THESE SIMPLE INSTRUCTIONS. Underneath the instructions was a sign in red letters. PLEASE DO NOT ALLOW CHILDREN TO PLAY WITH THE ADJUSTA™. THE ADJUSTA™ IS NOT A TOY. PENALTY FOR MISUSE $200.

Joe pressed the height button and the Adjusta went whirring right on down and stopped a few inches above floor level. It obviously wasn’t hooked up for the lightning rod application, so there was no need for the facility to take it below the floor; no, they’d just installed it as their standard john. Joe pressed the seat button and the seat went right on in to the point where a two-year-old could have sat on it without falling through. Far out.

He stood there pressing the buttons while the Adjusta went up and down and in and out because hell, he invented the damn thing. It gave him a warm, happy feeling just finding it there unexpectedly. Because this was a major chain motel. All over the United States people would be checking in and whether they had little kids with them or just happened to be personally on the small side they would find conveniences that did not discriminate. Plus, you just knew those kids would get a real kick out of trying it out. Whatever the motel management might decree.

Then he remembered that he had come in here for a reason. He answered the call of nature, and he was just zipping up his pants when something occurred to him. If you’re an ideas man you never know when or where your next idea is going to hit you. It can happen at the craziest times, times when the last thing you’d think you’d be thinking of would be ways to improve the lot of your fellow man.

What he suddenly thought was that he had designed a toilet that went down, and later he had enhanced the product with a seat that went in. It had never even crossed his mind that you could have a seat that went out.

“You know, Joe,” he said. “There is something you can do. Something you can get to work on right now, before you start introducing a product into new markets in a form that may not be appropriate to those markets.”

Because the thing that occurred to him, thinking back to that incident all those years ago on the bus, was that he had been way too judgmental about the guy with the paunch. So he was fat. Is that a crime? What right did he have to go around condemning people? Sixty per cent of Americans are obese. Or it might be more. Was he going to go around condemning sixty per cent of the population?

“Because the thing is, Joe, it’s no good saying lots of other people feel the same way. You’re in a position where that kind of attitude has consequences. You saw for yourself the trouble the guy had finding a seat he could fit into. This could have been an opportunity for you to think seriously about the product. But no, you went and introduced enhancements that would benefit one person in 14,000, without even thinking of enhancements that could be of value to the male half of sixty percent of the population. Well, I’m telling you here and now, Joe, that’s not just bad moral sense—it’s bad business sense. And here you are, thinking of moving into the Bible Belt—a region of the country that has way more than its fair share of persons in the jumbo category—and instead of taking reasonable precautions you’re about to do just what you did when you were starting out and didn’t know what you were doing. Rushing in without stopping to think.”

Sometimes you have to be hard on yourself. It’s easy to make excuses; sometimes you have to just refuse to accept those excuses. He walked back into the bedroom and started pacing up and down.

On the toilet side, of course, it wasn’t strictly true that the Adjusta benefited only a small minority of the population. But all you had to do was look around you to see that there were a lot of people whose needs were not being catered for. If somebody happens to have thighs that are four feet in circumference, you don’t have to be a genius to see that a toilet seat with a maximum span of fifteen inches, and a rim three inches wide, is not what the doctor ordered. In fact, if you think about it, the whole rim concept starts to look like a blind alley. What you want, at least in public conveniences, is a bench with a hole in it. An adjustable hole to accommodate persons of small stature. It’s obvious when you think about it, but then sometimes that’s all genius amounts to—seeing something that’s obvious when you think about it that nobody ever thought about before.

Joe was still pacing up and down when something else occurred to him. For whatever reason, he had suddenly remembered a program he had once seen on the Discovery Channel about sumo wrestlers. One gross detail of the sumo lifestyle had stayed with him all these years, and this was the fact that the guys were so fat they couldn’t wipe themselves—that little job got delegated to some other lucky son of a bitch.

Well, it may be gross, but you can say this for the Japanese, unlike us they’re not ashamed of the body so they actually dealt with the problem. In our society, on the other hand, people are so totally grossed out by this kind of fact of life that even toilet manufacturers don’t want to know. Because if you think about it, it would be the easiest thing in the world to fit every john with a kind of upside-down shower head, so people could clean down there at the press of a button without having to actually get within arm’s reach. But as far as our society is concerned the hygienic problems of people of above-average size are just that: their problem. You’d think people would be ashamed to condemn their fellow-citizens to substandard hygiene in public conveniences. It doesn’t work like that. What people do is, first they provide inadequate facilities; then they blame the fat person for not achieving a standard of cleanliness that can only be achieved with adequate facilities.

The more Joe thought about it, the more he couldn’t believe he’d never thought about it before. Instead of addressing the problems of the obese individual responsibly, insofar as those problems impacted on his own line of the country, he’d just sat back and jeered. Well, in all probability that jeering had cost him an obscene amount of lost business. All he could say was, if he was going to take that kind of attitude, he had it coming to him. Because the more he thought about it, the more he could see the oversize market had significant implications for the lightning rod trade.

“For better or worse, Joe, we live in a society where fat is not perceived to be physically attractive. If sixty per cent of the population are perceived to be physically unattractive, you know there’s a lot of sexual frustration going on there, which in an office environment can be deadly.”

It was dark outside. Where the highway snaked through the hills the bright white headlights, the small red taillights of the north and southbound cars were all that could be seen.

“Besides which, it’s not just a question of purely commercial considerations. A better business environment is important in achieving a better balance sheet. Sure. But there’s more at stake here than money. Because the thing of it is, if a class of people is perceived to not be physically attractive, a disproportionate proportion of those people are going to be turning for satisfaction to commercial sex anyway. With all the risks that entails. Well, if people are already disadvantaged by their appearance, it’s just not right that they should be further disadvantaged by being put at the mercy of prostitutes and pimps. Surely we, as a society, should not be forcing oversized individuals to choose between sexual deprivation and disgrace. Surely we should not be adding to their burden but, on the contrary, doing what we can to lighten the load.”

The McDonalds, the TCBY, the Waffle House, and the 7-Eleven were brightly lit, and the parking lots they stood in were lit by tall streetlights whose dull yellow light fell here and there on the scattered cars.

“Besides which, there are other people we should be taking into account. What if someone gets married and then puts on the pounds? You just know something like that is going to put a strain on a relationship. The couple may have all kinds of things in common, there’s just this one little source of friction. If you were able to remove that source of friction you’d be doing everyone a favor.”

The geese were fifty miles further on their journey, winging their way swiftly southward in the soft night sky.

“It’s up to you to start taking your responsibilities seriously and do something about that. There comes a time when it’s not enough to just go on taking. There comes a time when you have to give something back.”

Joe stopped by the window. High above, in the black sky, was one bright star.

“I’ll try to be more considerate in future,” he vowed. “I’ll try to be a better person. I’ll try to let my success be a force for good. After all, all any of us can ever do is try. All you can ever do is do the best you can.”