Lightning Rods

SOMETHING WRONG

Joe had once failed to sell a single set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in six months. He had once sold a single Electrolux and eaten 126 pieces of homemade pie in a time frame where most salesmen would hope to reverse the ratio of vacuum cleaners to pie. And now, after at first not succeeding, he had tried, tried, tried again and he had placed an innovative system of proactive sexual harassment management on a six-month trial basis.

It was all systems go. It was a product he believed in. His immediate money worries were over. He should have been having the time of his life. But something wasn’t right. At some very basic level, something was wrong.

There’s an old saying in show business: Never marry your mistress.

What the saying means is, if there’s something you do for fun, don’t turn it into something you have to do. If you turn it into a job that you get paid for, so that you have to do it whether you like it or not in order to get paid, chances are it will stop being fun.

This turns out to be true even of something like a sexual fantasy. If there’s something that turns you on, it may not have the same effect if you have to do it even if you’re not in the mood.

Joe had not been running the lightning rods for long before he discovered the truth of the old saying.

You might think that nothing could possibly beat acting out a fantasy that you have imagined hundreds of times in different guises. You might think that actually experiencing the situation you had fantasized about would be the ultimate erotic sensation.

Well, it ain’t necessarily so.

If you think about it, maybe that’s not so surprising. Why does coffee never taste as good as it smells? Why does bacon never taste the way it smells? Why does toast smell so good only to taste like dry toast? Why do frying onions always smell so good, when they’re nothing to write home about when you actually put them in your mouth?

Nobody knows the answer, but these are universally recognized phenomena. So maybe it’s not so surprising if other things don’t live up to expectations.

After the facility had been installed Joe obviously had to make sure it functioned correctly. He had expected it to be a real turn-on to act out a fantasy with a real live flesh-and-blood girl at the other end, but to tell the truth it wasn’t as good as his fantasies, because he was just stuck on one side, facing the wall in the disabled toilet, throughout.

Part of the problem was that the whole thing was so obviously prearranged. He’d never really stopped to think about it before, but one of the things that gave the fantasy a buzz was the element of the unexpected. It was the fact that the gal had her head out a window or whatever and wasn’t expecting anything to happen. But the whole point of having a lightning rod was that this was a gal who’d signed on the dotted line, it was the fact that clients could find release with a gal who was expecting something to happen that freed them from the spectre of sexual harassment suits.

The other problem was that a key part of the fantasy was the look of sudden realization on the gal’s face at the moment of impact, something that was, obviously, not accessible from behind. If he could have had access to the face on the other side of the wall it might have been a different story. But he couldn’t have that because it would defeat the whole object of the exercise. He had randomized selection so even he would not know which member of the team he was test-driving—that was only fair. So while it was going on he kept feeling that the really interesting stuff was going on on the other side of the wall. Funny.

Anyway he simply reminded himself that he was not there to enjoy himself but to do a job. The only thing was, it was important that the facility should be something that people would be able to enjoy. Everything was in place, exactly according to specification, and that did give him a good feeling—he’d had to work hard to get things to this stage. But would the experience really do what it was meant to for the men who would be using it on a daily basis?

If you’re in sales you know that confidence creates confidence. If you can convey to the customer that you consider yourself to have a first-class product, nine times out of ten the customer will see the product that way too.

“Besides, look at it this way,” Joe reminded himself. “Right now they’re getting exactly nothing. They’re in no position to get critical.”

He disposed of his condom in the receptacle provided, fighting off a feeling of let-down. Maybe it would have been better if the girl had been wearing clothes below the waist so he could have pushed her skirt up, he speculated. But any kind of clothes would have compromised the anonymity. That was probably why it had felt kind of clinical and impersonal.

We live in a flawed world. We can’t always have everything the way we want it. It’s important to be able to compromise.

And like they say in show business, never marry your mistress.

He tried, in other words, to deal with his sense of let-down by being philosophical about it, and by making jokes about it, which is what we all do when life doesn’t live up to some picture we had in our minds.

The transporter went back through the hole, and the panel closed. Joe was alone in the disabled cubicle.

He thought: No. I’m not going to walk away from this. Something about this doesn’t feel right. Now’s the time to work out what it is. Before it’s too late.

He paced up and down the cubicle. Something was wrong. Something was wrong.

As a salesman, he knew that if you go around with your head in the sand, sooner or later someone is going to give you a swift, hard kick in the butt. A good salesman knows you can’t afford to look the other way. If there is something wrong with the product, you sure as hell better know about it.

Joe paced up and down. It’s just not right, he thought. Something is just not right.

Suddenly it came to him.

That toilet has got to go.

Joe left the cubicle and paced gloomily up and down by the row of urinals. Had some momentary insanity taken hold of him when he came up with this? Because you’d think he would have noticed an obvious detail: In all the times he had been experimenting with the fantasy, not once had he set the scene in a lavatory. There was a reason for this. The reason is that even in a fantasy there is nothing even remotely erotic about a toilet bowl. In fact, considered as an accoutrement to a sexual encounter, a toilet bowl is a real cold shower.

The problem is that life is so different from fantasy. In a fantasy you can try out a toilet bowl as part of the picture, and if it doesn’t work you can just relocate to the kitchen. In life, if you knock a hole in the wall of a disabled toilet, that hole will go right on being there until you brick it up again. If there’s a toilet you don’t care for, someone is going to have to physically disconnect and remove it to get it out of there.

“Look, Joe,” he told himself. “Like it or not, the toilet has got to stay. They are legally obligated to provide that toilet for disabled persons in the building. If you take it out, you’ll be breaking the law.”





THE GUINEA PIGS

Meanwhile, out in the company, twenty results-orientated individuals were thinking I don’t believe it.

And fifteen of them were thinking guiltily that they knew why the company had decided to do it.

Fourteen of them were suddenly thinking Nah. OK, I may have stepped over the line, but I’m nothing compared to Ed Wilson.

Five had a clear conscience. They just thought Ed Wilson. That’s what it is, it’s Ed Wilson.

And Ed Wilson thought, This is all because of me.

One thing about results-orientated individuals is that they are highly competitive, which means that they are always alert to the possibility that some other individual may be achieving better results than they are. The conclusion everyone drew was that Ed Wilson must be really out of sight. They knew he was good, but they didn’t know he was that good. Otherwise no way would Steve Jackson have shelled out for something like this. If someone was egregious enough that something like this was necessitated, and he wasn’t out the door . . . hoo boy.





EARLY DAYS

In later years, when it got really big, one of the things people couldn’t really get their heads around was how it got off the ground in the first place, given the nature of what Joe was actually providing in the early days. In the form it ultimately took, sure, whatever your personal views on the legitimacy of a service of this nature you could at least see what it was that might appeal to people. Let’s say you could see what might appeal to people who were prepared to avail themselves of something like that. But people would try to set the scene, they’d try to imagine the set-up with the toilet just there because after all it was in a toilet cubicle, they’d try to imagine some guy coming in to try it out, and the mind just boggled. Even so, if the setting had been the only problem they could kind of see how you could get so you could just not notice it. But the thing people really had a hard time with was those first three weeks, before Joe cracked the packaging problem.

There was once a classic joke on the Bob Newhart Show in its heyday about a deodorant called Armpit, and something about the product as Joe initially introduced it to the world reminded people of Armpit. How could anybody go into a toilet stall and just wait for the naked half of a half-naked woman to come through a hole in the wall ass backwards? Nobody could see why something like that wouldn’t kill the project stone dead. Apart from anything else, it was insulting to the people meant to be using it. The message something like that sent was “You’re so desperate you’ll take anything. And I mean anything. So screw you, Bozo.”

The fact was that people were so used to all the features that everybody later came to take for granted that they couldn’t really recapture the whole novelty of the situation. It was like trying to imagine what it was like in the days when flush toilets were aspirational.

Mike Newsome was one of the original guinea pigs, and as he said later he was initially skeptical. If you’re in accounting, it’s your job to be skeptical, and that’s not something you can just turn off. The way Mike initially saw it was that it was some gimmick to deflect legitimate requests for pay increases. Or it was some cock-eyed motivational guru-type plan. Next thing you knew they would have them all out in the woods banging drums. Or somebody had decided they had to do something to appease the feminists, and this was what they had come up with.

Still, when the message came up on his screen the first time he went along to the disabled toilet, if only to satisfy his curiosity. Because frankly he couldn’t believe they were serious. He had seen some pretty dumb things in his time, but this took the fruitcake.

Anyway, he had gone along to the disabled, and closed the door, and sure enough there was a dispenser beside the toilet paper containing a supply of condoms. Then a panel opened in the wall.

Well, it was for real, all right. And his reaction was exactly what people would have predicted who would also have predicted that the show would fold on day one. The total absence of packaging was a real turn-off. Mike had this impulse to pat the girl on the behind and tell her to go home, except there was no way to communicate with her. Where did they get them anyway? So he just stood there with his hands in his pockets. For some reason the fact that you were just looking at a wall, where ordinarily you would have seen someone’s shoulders and head, made you aware that on the other side of the wall was someone’s shoulder and head, the head of someone you had probably actually seen around the office. On the other side of the wall someone was just waiting for you to get on with it. For some reason, maybe it was something to do with the tiles and the stall and the bare functionality of the environment, something about it made him think of a concentration camp or something. It kind of gave him the creeps.

His other reaction was also exactly what people would have predicted, which was that this had to be aimed at people who were so desperate they’d screw anything that moved, and weren’t too particular about the movement. In other words, Ed Wilson. It was something put together by someone with no class, for someone with no class. In other words, Ed Wilson. In fact, it wouldn’t have surprised Mike to find that management had let nineteen other guys use the facility purely to camouflage an exercise in Ed Wilson containment.

Anyway he just stood there, realizing he was going to have to do something, and also that the one thing he couldn’t do was go around to the Ladies to say case dismissed. From what he could see, this was absolutely typical of the half-assed way the thing had been set up. It didn’t seem to have occurred to anybody that if for some reason things didn’t go according to plan, there could be a need to get the message across. All they would have had to put in was a light switch with some prearranged signals, or a slot with some preprinted messages, but no, that was too easy. So that was part of it, just the sheer aggro of the fact that there was no other option available. And then, when he thought about why it was giving him the creeps he realized it was a knee-jerk reaction with no real justification in reality. It was a free country. Nobody was making anybody do anything they didn’t want to; in fact the company was probably paying a lot of money to compensate them for their time. Besides. This was something experts had determined was helpful in increasing the productivity and job satisfaction of male employees. Wasn’t there a chance that these guys were on to something?

Because let’s face it, whatever else you might think of Joe, he’d really done his homework. The guy knew his stuff. All this research on baboons in captivity—you can’t just shrug something like that off. And it suddenly occurred to Mike—of course, later he realized he was giving Joe too much credit, but this was what he thought at the time—that maybe it was clinical and unvarnished for a reason. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be erotic. The point was not to plug into whatever mental trip someone might want to be on, the point was to provide a physical release for physical needs.

And then he thought Well, since it’s there.

So he set aside his skepticism for the moment and availed himself of the facility. It was quite a strange experience in some ways. Still, it was enjoyable enough for what it was.

Anyway, almost straight away he noticed that he was experiencing an unusual sense of well-being. He hadn’t been aware of his attention straying while he was trying to concentrate, whether to sex or to anything else, but for a significant period of time afterwards he felt more focused on the job in hand than he had for a long time.

Also, instead of hurrying away after work to go to the gym, he ended up staying an extra hour to finish off something that had been pending.

Obviously somebody knew exactly what they were doing. They had worked out that the human male animal needs a release. Even if he isn’t actually aware of it, getting that release would improve his performance. You had to give them credit for going ahead with something a lot of people would consider unorthodox. They had probably come up against a lot of skepticism before people had had the chance to experience first hand just how helpful it could be.

It later turned out that seventeen out of the first twenty responded in exactly the same way.

They went in expecting something hot and found the reality fell a long way short of their expectations. But there was no way to tell the girl to go away. And while they were mulling that one over, and thinking it was so crude no one but Ed Wilson would see anything in it at all, they would suddenly remember all the information they’d been given on the baboon in captivity. They would realize that the clinical, unerotic environment was there for a reason. And they would remember that experts had determined that the male animal performs best if certain physical needs are given a release.

Being competitive, results-orientated individuals, they took a professional approach: If something will improve your performance, go for it.

What about the other three?

Well, two out of three wanted nothing to do with it.

The third was Ed Wilson.