Lightning Rods

AN ATMOSPHERE OF MUTUAL RESPECT

One of the mistakes that Joe made in the beginning was to assume that the biggest problem would be finding women who would be willing to do the job. The way he looked at it was that there were all kinds of reasons why anyone who had the skills to do straight office work would not want to branch out, no matter how big the pay-off. Whereas finding companies to install the facility would, he assumed, be relatively straightforward. Everybody knew sexual harassment was a major problem; everybody knew that issuing directives and guidelines that stayed, like as not, in the bottom of people’s In tray was not the answer to that problem. Especially since the results-orientated type of guy who tended to transgress the boundaries was the least likely to waste time reading memos on sexual harassment. In fact, if somebody has time to spend reading that kind of garbage that’s probably not an individual you want on your workforce in the first place. If cuts have to be made, that individual is going to be one of the first to go, thus further eroding the number of people in the workplace who have familiarized themselves with the sexual harassment policy.

The result was that Joe seriously underestimated the time he was going to need to get this baby off the ground.

When he had talked nineteen women into believing that they could be the woman in a thousand, all in just under two weeks, he began to feel he could do no wrong. All the self-doubts that had plagued him in the days of selling encyclopedias and vacuum cleaners just slipped away. If he could sell this he could do anything. Every salesman knows the feeling of incredulous euphoria that comes when you have miraculously managed to shift a product nobody in their right mind would buy. Every salesman knows the feeling of rapturous disbelief that comes when you’ve gone through the pitch you came up with for that unshiftable product and somebody actually swallowed it.

Multiply that feeling by nineteen and Joe’s conviction that he could do no wrong will not seem so far-fetched. But as every salesman knows, that’s a dangerous conviction to have. You’re only as good as your last sale. What works in one context won’t necessarily work in another. If you get to thinking you can sell things standing on your head with one arm tied behind your back, sooner or later a customer is going to start to wonder: Why would I want to buy something from some idiot standing on his head with one arm tied behind his back?

If someone had asked Joe, when he first rented the office, whether he genuinely believed this was something that could happen, Joe would probably have said, “I don’t honestly know.” But once he had nineteen ladies signed up, every one of whom had accepted every word he said as the Gospel truth, there seemed to be absolutely no reason why all should not come to pass exactly as he had described it. All he had to do was find some people prepared to hire those nineteen ladies, and it was a done deal.

It was time to approach the business community.

He made a point of going straight to the top. People who have worked in personnel for a number of years, he felt, tend to think in clichés and be resistant to new ideas.

He presented the product as a solution to the issue of sexual harassment. Without, obviously, going into a lot of unnecessary detail in his introductory letter.

He wrote to 1,000 companies. 800 didn’t bother to reply.

A lot of people said they had everything under control.

Twenty agreed to see him.

The first time was the hardest. He had thought it over a million times, but he had never gone into someone’s office where he had made an appointment and sat down and explained it out loud. He had deliberately gone straight to the top, which meant he was talking to a guy who had what it takes to succeed in a competitive industry and had made it to the top. The guy was wearing a suit as expensive as Joe’s. He stood up and shook hands when Joe came in and then he invited Joe to tell him what it was about.

Joe covered the points he had to cover. The guy was in his early fifties. He listened without much expression, putting in a couple of questions. When he was sure he understood what was being suggested he said, “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place. I won’t take up any more of your time.” And he buzzed through to his secretary and asked her to show the gentleman out.

That was the only appointment for the day. Joe went home and took off the thousand-dollar suit and hung it up. He took off the red silk tie and unbuttoned his collar.

He lay on the bed. This time he had a fantasy about a football team that had a hole in the wall of the locker room. The locker room was next to the changing room for the cheerleaders. One way of doing it would be for the cheerleaders to take it in rotation to provide an outlet for the players. Another way of doing it would be for each cheerleader to go once, and each player to go once. Another way would be to have an initiation for new cheerleaders, where a new cheerleader would be serviced by the whole team. They would have the try-outs for the cheerleaders, and the girls would work their butts off to make the cut, and then the head cheerleader, a real bitch, would have a new girl kneel on some kind of thing that rolled through the hole. The hole could be either right out in the open in the locker room where the players would line up to take their turns, or it could be in some kind of cubicle like a toilet stall.

Or you could have a row of holes in the wall, with all of the girls lined up, and the whole team could tackle them at the same time. You could have two installments. Offense and defense.

You could see them being rewarded in that way if they won. But what if they lost? What if there was a really major defeat?

The coach would probably be pretty pissed off.

Are you a bunch of asskickers or p-ssylickers? he’d shout, and when the cheerleaders were lined up he would order the team to go in with their tongues.

Aw but Coach

Move it! the coach would shout. Anyone who’s not in there in the next five seconds is off the team, and that means you, Jerkovsky!

On the other side of the wall, an expression of incredulous bliss would gradually spread over the faces of the cheerleaders.

Or it might be that one guy screwed up royally. Dropped a pass. Missed a kick.

All right, the rest of you can go, the coach would say. Jackson, you’re not leaving until each and every one of those girls has had ten minutes by the clock.

Aw but Coach

Get moving.

But what if one of them has her period?

Do it.

Jackson would get started and every time he came up for air the coach would ram his face back down. A good coach knows that sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. Because at the very next game Jackson would be in a completely different league. He would be spotted by a talent scout, and in a few years he’d be playing at the Superbowl. And all because, throughout the game, the coach had the cheerleaders showing their pants in a routine that had more than its fair share of triple back flips. It was pretty good motivation for the rest of the team, too.

Joe lay on his side and he realized that he had gotten side-tracked yet again. Instead of beating up on himself, the way he usually would have, he just sent the victorious team back to the locker room for its reward.

Afterwards he sat up and put his feet on the floor. He thought suddenly Wait just a minute.

Something was bothering him.

It took him a while to put his finger on it. The thing that was bothering him was whether it could actually happen that way. Given the initial starting position of the cheerleaders. Because as he saw it those little short skirts definitely came ass backwards through the wall, allowing the team to go in for a quick forward pass. But it just didn’t seem realistic to have oral sex applied from behind, was that even possible?

Sometimes the best thing you can do with a fantasy is just accept that some of the details may be a little unrealistic. In the old days, before he started getting his life together, he would have thrashed out the problem just in case he might want to utilize the fantasy on some future occasion. Already he had moved on from that. The main thing was that he had gotten whatever it was out of his system. The fantasy, with all its undoubted flaws, had enabled him to achieve that.

There was a lesson to be learned from this.

Because as a salesman the question you have to ask yourself, when you do anything, is, “Why did I do that?” If you can find out the answer, you’ll understand just that much more about how other people tick, too.

He had thought he was prepared to face rejection, but the truth of the matter was it had been humiliating. The guy hadn’t even said anything. He’d just made up his mind that somebody who could come up with this kind of idea was some kind of human cockroach. You don’t waste time explaining to a cockroach that it’s not welcome, you just want it gotten out of the way without making a mess on the kitchen floor.

Well, it’s just a feature of the human psyche that when we undergo humiliation of some kind we tend to look for somebody else to humiliate, even if it’s just in our imagination.

“Well, let me ask you this, Joe. Do you think for one second that other people in that organization don’t face humiliation? Do you think people don’t fail? Do you think people aren’t made to feel inadequate? You know that’s not so.”

He looked at the thousand-dollar suit on its hanger.

“The only difference is, people in an organization tend to take out their humiliation on someone lower than themselves. One person is made to feel bad, and before you know it that feeling has been passed on, poisoning the atmosphere of the organization. Look at that study of baboons in captivity. The office is a form of captivity. The difference is, a baboon isn’t trying to achieve anything. Whereas people in the business world have a job to do. But when people go around taking out their frustrations on their subordinates, it impacts negatively on the way they do their job. It undermines their self-esteem, for a start. Maybe it makes them defensive, unwilling to take risks. Or maybe it makes them reckless, taking unnecessary risks. Maybe somebody never accepts their suggestions, so they just decide to present them with a fait accompli. Whereas if people had a way of siphoning off all that hostility they could go back to the office and get on with the job. But that’s exactly what a lightning rod offers the opportunity to do.

“So the lesson we can learn is, providing a safe outlet for sexual urges is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re offering people the chance to insulate their negative emotions, instead of directing their aggression and hostility at their colleagues. That’s a valuable service. Don’t you ever forget that.”

What he realized was that it was the fact that he was able to be humiliated that gave him such an insight into the reaction of the ordinary guy to a typical work environment. There are people who don’t let things get to them—but those people are the exceptions. It’s by understanding, and addressing, the problems of the average guy that you can make a real contribution to society.

The second place he went, the guy he talked to was wearing jeans and a sweater with holes in the elbows and no shoes.

Joe covered the points he had to cover and the guy started to laugh.

He said: “Well, I gotta hand it to you, that’s a very original idea.”

He started laughing again.

He said: “And the hell of it is, you could be on to something. I’d be interested to see how you do.”

He went outside. It was a soft, bright day, and the wind was pulling leaves off the willows. A dog trotted by, lifted his leg, and trotted on.

There was a statue in the center of the square of General Lafayette. His green bronze three-cornered hat and the green bronze shoulders of his coat were white with pigeon shit.

On the sidewalk beside a fire hydrant were a couple of dried dog turds.

He thought: You know, if people went around doing that it would be really disgusting. If some guy just squatted down by the fire hydrant and left a couple of turds it would be really gross. And can you imagine what it would be like if everyone did that?

He walked down the steps to the sidewalk. The wind was ruffling the fine grass of the lawn like the fur of a glossy green animal.

He thought: Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.

Now previously, in the days when he was selling, or trying to sell, vacuum cleaners, he would have thought this kind of self-doubt was a sign of weakness. He would have thought the problem with him was that he kept having doubts, and that the way to solve the problem was to just pretend they didn’t exist and hope they would go away. He would have thought that he would have been a better salesman if he didn’t have doubts. He would have thought being the type of guy to have doubts was exactly what made him relatively unsuccessful as a salesman.

The fact is, every great salesman has doubts. In fact, a great salesman has more doubts than anyone else. Because what those doubts are, is the questions other people are going to be asking you. A great salesman is able to anticipate a wider range of questions than other people. And instead of just hoping they’ll go away, a great salesman uses those doubts as a chance to tackle those questions head on. Which is why a great salesman is never taken by surprise.

This time, anyway, instead of just ignoring his doubts, he asked himself: “OK, if it isn’t a good idea, why isn’t it a good idea?”

And by actually looking at the question he was able to come up with an answer.

Of course it would be disgusting if people went around depositing turds in the street. That’s what we have toilets for. Nobody wants to look at something like that, so you put it out of sight so they don’t have to.

But that was exactly what a lightning rod was supposed to do. Instead of a young girl jeopardizing herself by standing on the street in a dangerous neighborhood, putting herself at risk and in all likelihood being exploited by a pimp, you give her the opportunity to work in the safety of an office environment. Instead of acquiring a criminal record she is able to work at filing or some other clerical task and improve her skills. Her pay reflects the fact that she is providing an outlet for men who would otherwise be putting themselves at risk. But the whole thing is conducted in the privacy of a toilet cubicle. As far as her fellow workers are concerned, she is no different from anyone else. As far as his fellow workers are concerned, he is just going to the john. The whole point of the arrangement is to avoid giving anyone cause for offense.

So he went on to work his way through the other companies on his list.

Once he had a foot in the door he explained, “It’s not for me to make moral judgments. I’m a businessman. I deal with people as they are, not as they ought to be.”

“Speaking as a businessman,” he went on, “I know that it is often the most valuable individuals in a company who present the greatest vulnerability to sexual harassment related issues. We know that a high level of testosterone is inseparable from the drive that produces results. Speaking of people as they are rather than as they should be I know that a high-testosterone-level individual has a high likelihood of being sexually aggressive; if the individual is working twenty-hour days as a driven results-orientated individual often does, that sexual aggression will find an outlet in the office.”

“Well.”

“You invest in training. A man is bringing in $100 million of business. You leave him open to the danger of momentarily forgetting himself with a little $25,000-a-year secretary?”

“Well . . .”

“A properly run organization protects its employees.”

“Sure, but . . .”

“I have strong views on sexual harassment. I believe that those in a place of work who do not welcome sexual advances should not be subjected to them. I also believe that a man who is producing results in today’s competitive market place has a right to be protected from potential undesirable side effects of the physical constitution which enables him to make a valued contribution to the company.”

At this stage he might be asked, “Are you suggesting we hire prostitutes?!” Or “Surely you are not suggesting…!”

“Certainly not,” he would protest, “prostitution is degrading to all concerned, an atmosphere of mutual respect is indispensable in the modern office.”

“I don’t understand,” he would be told.

The concept was so revolutionary at the time that prostitution was the only thing people could think of. That was how original he was. He had to explain the whole thing from the word Go.

He would explain the concept of the lightning rod in the face of skepticism.

He would explain the importance of confidentiality.

He would say: “The last thing we want to do is ghettoize a certain class of women. What we are doing is introducing highly qualified professionals to the workplace. These are women who on their credentials could walk straight into an opening of a more conventional nature, women with goals to pursue who are willing to make a real contribution to the company.”

He would say: “The average man things of sex every five seconds.”

“The average employee,” Joe would add, “spends two minutes in the course of a year reading the sexual harassment policy. If that. This is not, in my opinion, the level of protection which is appropriate to a high-testosterone performance-orientated individual.”

He would sometimes add that access to the lightning rods could be restricted to high performers, acting as an incentive to less driven individuals.

He would sometimes cite, if the occasion seemed to warrant it, a study on the orangutang or the baboon. Primates in captivity, he would explain, form hierarchical societies in which place is established by humiliation and aggressive sexual behavior. Humans are primates. The office is a form of captivity. Every precaution must be taken to avoid stigmatizing persons providing this valuable service. Those using them must never see their faces. They must be indistinguishable from their colleagues.

He generally just made up whatever research he wanted on the baboon, since actual studies of the baboon might not support the point he wanted to make.

Similarly with statistics, a good salesman has a feel for the statistics that will carry weight in a particular context, and will tend to go with his feeling rather than with what scientists have come up with in some totally unrelated context.

One man said he was not exactly disputing the points made but he did not think he could reward his top earners with titless sex.

Another said: “What if the man wanted to be naked from the waist down and whipped?”

“Why would anyone want that?” asked Joe.

Thinking What a weirdo.

The guy said: “Well, some guys like that.”

Joe thought: What if it turned out most high-performing individuals liked to be whipped on the bare butt? That would be something to see.

One guy said he would give it a try.