Lightning Rods

TAKE OFF

Pete was one of the men who wanted nothing to do with it. There are all kinds of crazy people out there; who was there higher up in the organization who would be crazy enough to listen to them? And no matter who was that crazy, the obvious question you had to ask yourself was, is this something I want to be seen to be involved in? Is this something I even potentially want anyone to know I had anything to do with? Screwing someone from behind in the disabled john? To say this was a question you had to ask yourself implied that there was a possibility in a million years that you would be that dumb. But he had kept his counsel to himself, because this is the kind of thing where if anyone does it other people can’t afford to be seen to disapprove.

What he actually said was that he was in a relationship. The fact was that even if it hadn’t been a stupid idea for other reasons it would not be a good idea for anyone in a relationship. Not that he noticed that stopping some of the others. But if you’re in a relationship it’s important not to have anything you would rather the other person didn’t know, because sooner or later they will sense that something is going on. Also, there are some things that there is no point expecting a woman to see in the light you might see it.

As far as he was concerned it was offered as a purely physical convenience, to be availed of in the spirit it was intended. Questions of fidelity would not really apply in that kind of situation. But if you were to try to explain that to someone you were serious about you would be wasting your time. Anything you might say to show why it wasn’t infidelity would only make matters worse. You might think a woman would get upset if you fell in love with someone else, and that it would be completely obvious that screwing someone through a hole in the wall was not a meaningful activity in that context. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. If you know what’s good for you you’ll leave well enough alone.

Besides, if you’re actually in a relationship it’s important to be able to satisfy the needs of the other person.

He wouldn’t have minded trying it just once, to see what it was like, but safety first. You never know where there may be a concealed camera these days. You can’t be too careful.

In his opinion this attitude was justified after just one week.

It was getting on for 11 o’clock in the morning, everything pretty much as normal, a day like any other day, when suddenly the fire alarm went off. It wasn’t the time of day when they usually had drills, and at first everyone just assumed it was a mistake, but it kept going, and finally an announcement was made telling everyone to get out of the building. So they all cleared out of the building and stood around on the lawn, and after about fifteen minutes a car turned up, and the guy who had explained about the facility got out of the car and entered the building. He was gone about ten minutes, and then he came out and told everyone they could go back to work.

Later word started to get around. What had happened was that some a*shole had tried to ski off-piste. Lose the condom. Or go anal or something. And the lightning rod had set off the alarm. Once that happened, apparently, the cubicle could only be opened from the outside. The anonymity of the offender was preserved by clearing the building of all other personnel, while a representative of lightning rods came to reprimand the individual and inform him of the suspension of privileges he had incurred.

At first everyone had just assumed it was Ed Wilson, but it turned out Ed Wilson was actually out of town, so nobody knew who the guy was. So you could say anonymity was protected. But as far as Pete was concerned, this was not a situation you even potentially wanted to be in. You could see where they would have to have something like this for the girls’ protection, but the potential for having your cover blown was such that he personally wanted nothing to do with it.

Bill was initially suspicious. He had already experienced difficulty in concealing the fact that he was gay; he suspected that this was really a covert ploy to flush out gay members of staff, while ostensibly doing nothing more sinister than keeping Ed Wilson under control. Even though he was suspicious he couldn’t help but be amused. The thing was so absolutely typical of the way straights would pick up on something introduced by the gay community and rob it of all the things that had made it worth doing in the first place. In fact what it just went to show was what pathetic sex lives straights had, they had to be really desperate. If it had come right down to it he might have been able to use the facility if he had had to, but he noticed one or two other guys said they were in relationships. So he just said he was in a relationship. He had a laugh about it with Luke afterwards.

Ed Wilson thought that people had overreacted to some incidents that had gotten blown way out of proportion. All he had done was make the mistake of thinking he was working with people with a sense of humor. But the way he looked at it was, if people were going to take it that way, why look a gift horse in the mouth?





EUREKA!

A couple of weeks went by. No one had complained about the toilet. No one had complained about the fact that there was no element of the unexpected. But it kept bothering Joe. He tried not to let it bother him. He went on selling the product with all the force and eloquence at his command, just as if he had unshakable confidence in a product that featured a disabled toilet standing by. But all the time it was there, at the back of his mind. Something wasn’t right.

A good salesman pays attention to his instincts. Even if a product is selling, even if the customer appears satisfied, if you’re dissatisfied with some feature of the product sooner or later the public is going to catch up with you. Or, to put it another way, a competitor is going to come along who has ironed out that particular wrinkle. If you can get to the wrinkle first, while building on the brand loyalty you have hopefully established, you’re way ahead of the game.

An ordinary salesman, of course, can only voice his concern to head office in the hope that it gets passed on to product development. Joe being Head Office, Product Development, and Sales all in one, all he had to do was let his salesman’s instincts carry out their war of attrition at a subconscious level. Finally it was just too much. Law or no law, something was going to have to be done.

For once, Joe made a point of not taking any paperwork home. He was going to take the evening off and just brainstorm for a while and see what came of it.

He decided to just take it one thing at a time. The first thing was all this nudity. For whatever reason, an already naked body is just not as big of a turn-on as one where there is some nudity yet to be achieved. The perennial appeal of the striptease relies on this very fact. Now, for purposes of anonymity it was obviously of the essence that female staff should not have any of their own clothes visible. Shortsightedly, he had been just assuming that meant they shouldn’t have any clothes visible at all. Whereas there was absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t be actually wearing a tight skirt such as he used in his fantasies—the type of skirt that wouldn’t ordinarily be worn to an office anyway, so there wouldn’t be a chance of unfortunate misunderstandings. He could just bulk buy a supply of short, tight skirts in manmade leopardskin, and they could be kept in some kind of storage container in the Ladies disabled, and the gals could slip into one before going on duty.

Once he’d cracked that one he wished he’d taken the time to confront the problem earlier. Because the toilet was another kettle of fish.

He kept thinking and thinking and thinking, but somehow the solution eluded him.

By this stage the rest of the guinea pigs had adjusted somehow, and the project had gotten through the initial rough patch. The way the guinea pigs saw it was, you don’t expect Vitamin C to taste like an orange. You take it because it’s good for you. And after they’d tried it a few times they didn’t really notice most of the features that at first had seemed strange.

Then Joe introduced the short skirts and the high heels and the whole thing took off.

But one of the things that people commented on later was just how little had been done to prepare people psychologically for the kind of outspread a scheme like this might have. In the early stages virtually nothing was known about the effect of using lightning rods on individuals whom the facility was meant to protect. The least Joe could have done, people felt, was to monitor participants carefully for adverse collaterals. One of the many things people couldn’t get their heads around was the fact that Joe had basically gone into business after a single study involving getting members of an office to play computerized Spin the Bottle. And frankly, to call it a study was stretching it. Basically all he’d been doing was seeing what he could get away with. Responsible employment psychology this was not.

It was hardly surprising, in the circumstances, that there were some painful surprises in store for some of Joe’s guinea pigs. The only thing that was surprising was that anyone could have been surprised.





LET DOWN

Chris was one of the first to discover that the seemingly straightforward sexual harassment preventative could lead to unanticipated and tragic consequences.

The funny thing was that he just thought it was funny to begin with. He had no strong feelings about it one way or another. It could be that it would be helpful for guys who were not getting satisfaction elsewhere. This was not really a problem for him, and when he was at work he liked to think one hundred percent about work, so he did not really expect to make much use of the facility.

What he privately thought to himself was that it sounded like the kind of idea someone would come up with who was not getting satisfaction. But there’s no point in needlessly alienating someone who has gotten the go-ahead from higher up, so when it was explained to him he just said Hoo boy and kept his thoughts to himself.

But a funny thing happened. He tried out the facility a couple of times just to see what it was like, and what he noticed suddenly was just how much the urge to get instant gratification had been dominating his relations with the opposite sex. For instance, he had tended to go to the kind of venue where you would expect to find women who were also interested in instant gratification. Most women operate on a different time scale from men, but not all, and he had tended to seek out the ones who would not take offense if you took things at your own speed.

What this meant was that he had actually been very limited in the kind of women he met. Marketing is not something that gives you a lot of time to stop and think, it’s a fast-moving game, but every once in a while he would vaguely think that someday he was going to want to get to know some other kind of girl. Because obviously you don’t want your kids when the time comes being brought up by the kind of girl who would go home with a complete stranger she just met in a bar. Then every once in a while his mother would arrange for him to meet some girl who looked exactly like a dachshund. Given the choice he had always felt he would rather not have children with genes that were fifty percent dachshund. So he had always known vaguely that one day he was going to have to do something himself, only the same drive that made him such a success in marketing kept pushing him into going after the kind of girl who responds instantly to a guy with drive.

Anyway after one of his trial sessions he went to a bar as per usual and he noticed a table of girls, only this time the one he noticed was the quiet one. He went over and struck up a conversation, and then a couple of the louder girls were asked to dance. So they went off and he suggested dancing to the quiet one and she said No, and then he said What about going out on the deck? They went out and found a table overlooking the lake. There was a full moon in the sky and ducks quacked softly in the reeds. It turned out that she was a librarian. The other girls at her table lived in the same apartment building and they had persuaded her to come out with them but it was not the kind of thing she usually did.

They talked for a while and they discovered that they shared an interest in Philip K. Dick. So they got into a long conversation and when they went back inside the other girls had gone, leaving her with no way to get home. He had offered her a ride, and he had driven her home, and he hadn’t even tried to kiss her goodnight.

What he realized afterwards was that unlike the way he usually approached things he had not been mentally at some subliminal level calculating his chances and then managing events to move them in a certain direction and interpreting everything that went on in terms of how well he was doing in terms of getting things to turn out a certain way. This time he had been able to step aside from those preoccupations and realize that Louise was actually not seeing anything that went on in those terms. The reason he was able to do this was not just the fact that he had obtained satisfaction earlier in the day, but that he had the certainty that he could get it again the following day if he wanted it, without any of the undoubted hassle of persuading someone to go back with him, persuading someone that they were both adults, and then in the morning getting rid of her without a lot of hassle. The disability facility lacked a lot of the features you typically looked for in sex—tits, for example. The possibility of things developing in an oral direction. But it wasn’t bad for what it was. And somehow it had enabled him to get to know Louise without coming across as obnoxious. If you’re in marketing you tend to be pretty direct, and that can spill over to parts of life where it is not really adaptive. Somehow he had gotten around that pitfall for a change.

One thing you soon realize in marketing is that there’s a lot goes on in people that they themselves don’t necessarily understand. That applies to you just as much as anyone out there. Once he had recognized how much his drives were coloring his life he was able to see that he would have to do something about it if it was not to affect his developing relationship with Louise.

So he made a point of going to the disability after that, and he started going out with Louise—dinner, movies, concerts—and he was able to give her the space she needed without getting impatient the way he otherwise might have.

Now the thing was, Louise was not the kind to go home with someone from a bar, but she was no dachshund. She wasn’t what you would call a babe, but that wasn’t to say she wasn’t attractive. The more Chris got to know her and the more she relaxed, the more attractive she became.

They discovered they had lots of other things in common, like sharing a liking for R.E.M. and spaghetti Westerns. The relationship gradually deepened. One day Chris picked Louise up at the library on a Saturday, and she was reading to the little kids in the children’s section. It was obvious that this was somebody who would take a lot of trouble with her own kids. Chris had had to fight every step of the way to make himself what he was, with no help from his family, and he had always promised himself that if he ever had kids it would be different for them.

He decided that he was ready to settle down and he asked Louise to marry him and she said yes. So it’s funny the way things work out, because none of that would have happened if he hadn’t been able to let her take her time. Once they were engaged there was no longer any need to make use of the facility, it had served its purpose. It was just for those few crucial weeks that it had helped to keep drives he had not been fully aware of under control.

But one day they were talking about something and Louise said if there was one thing she hated it was being lied to. “I can stand anything but a lie,” she said. “Don’t ever let there be any secrets between us, Chris.”

Afterwards he could never work out how it happened. Maybe he had had too much to drink, so that he had felt as though he could tell her anything and it wouldn’t matter. Whatever it was, Louise had suddenly sensed that there was something he wasn’t telling her and she had said the thing about a secret was that not telling it made it much worse than it actually was. So he had said it wasn’t anything really, it was just a facility they had at work that he had made use of a couple of times, and Louise said you mean like corporate hospitality or something and he said kind of and he explained and Louise just totally freaked out.

It was at a time like this that the facility really came into its own. There are times when you just want something completely uncomplicated. There are times when you just don’t feel like talking. There are times when all you want is something that will take your mind off things. If it hadn’t been for the disability the whole Louise thing would probably have really gotten in the way of work. Instead he was able to just put it behind him and concentrate on achieving his goals.

Others, of course, had stories of their own. Something that had looked completely uncomplicated, a purely physical convenience, turned out to have far-reaching psycho-social repercussions.

Whether Joe could have circumvented these problems if he had done a follow-up study on the Spin the Bottle participants will never be known. Long after the lightning rods had become a standard fixture in a wide variety of corporate environments somebody got the idea of going back to talk to the people who had taken part in the Spin the Bottle trial; to his surprise he found that the Spin the Bottle installation was still in place ten years after Joe signed off on the project. A couple of members of staff who were more computer savvy than Joe had doctored the software to introduce a couple of new twists, but essentially the proto-lightning rod was still going strong, with no noticeable negatives that anyone could see. Nobody had to do it who didn’t want to. Most people thought it was fun.

Nobody had made a connection between the application and the lightning rods they had heard or read about in the media. When the researcher pointed out that their device had been developed by the same guy, who had gone on to develop the more hard-core service immediately after, people were taken aback and disgusted; they all agreed that something like that would have poisoned the office atmosphere. What they had was just something for fun, something to lighten up the day. They certainly were not going to upgrade.

So even if Joe had taken a more responsible attitude toward checking for fallout, it’s possible that the net result would have been just the same.

As for the lightning rods, relatively few aspects of their experience could in any case have been satisfactorily modeled through extrapolation from the earlier Spin the Bottle trial.