by Helen Dewitt
“So are we supposed to do it right now?” A girl with shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes was looking up at him. A mug on her desk said SHARON.
“That’s right,” said Joe. “As soon as the draw comes through the two selected persons are supposed to make their way to the clock.”
“Well, here goes nothing,” said the girl. She got up and walked to the clock. A tall, gangling guy with a big Adam’s apple and an acne problem walked up to the clock and pecked her on the mouth. There was scattered applause and laughter in the office. And they walked back to their desks.
Am I just wasting my time here? thought Joe. Something told him he was barking up the wrong tree.
But he said, “Thank you. See you tomorrow, same time, same place.”
“Look, Joe,” he told himself that night. “Will you stop being so negative about everything? Just look at what you’ve achieved. For starters, you wrote a program that worked! Plus, you got people to do something they wouldn’t necessarily have thought of themselves that was a little embarrassing. Not one single person asked to see your credentials. Nobody even questioned your right to make that kind of suggestion. And this is just Day One.”
“I know,” he said. “I know I’m off to a good start. It’s just that I can’t see there ever being much money in it if this is all there’s ever going to be to it. But if there’s ever going to be more to it there’s one hell of a long way to go.”
“Well, that’s true in one sense,” he said. “But in another sense this might actually be the harder of the two to swing. Because with this kind of set-up people can see what they get. They go in it with their eyes open. The gals know there’s a guy in the office with a face like Mount Vesuvius, you gotta get them to agree to a potential involvement, even if a pretty superficial involvement, with someone who looks like that. Whereas in the longer term you’re talking about an arrangement where nobody has to see anything unpleasant. The only thing you’ve got to overcome is the initial prejudice against engaging in intercourse in an unfamiliar set-up.”
He sighed. “Say what you will,” he said. “This was a real anti-climax.”
So he spent a lot of time getting arbitrarily selected individuals to kiss each other. The longer it went on, the more he felt like he was on the wrong track. He thought he could probably add a random selection for tongue in mouth but he couldn’t see how to get from there to the hole in the wall. Or maybe you could get to the hole in the wall but it would take a long time.
Still, he kept notes on the experiment and it was not without interest. There were three attractive women in an office of ten; there was one good-looking guy, two passable again out of ten. The unattractive you could say had an obvious interest in taking part. But even the attractive were prepared to play as long as they had a one in three chance of someone attractive. For this they were willing to run a two in three chance of someone unattractive. At the end of the three weeks they all said they’d enjoyed it but once an hour was too disruptive.
He thought: Wait just a second.
What if it worked like this?
You randomly select two members of staff who may kiss at their own discretion. By the end of the day! As soon as they have kissed they set off the selection device. But again, the persons selected may respond in their own time! Within a 24-hour period!
So he held a meeting with the staff putting forward the suggestion and it was received with enthusiasm. It meant another head-to-head with Beginning Programming for Dummies, but the thing that separates the sheep from the goats is the willingness to go that extra mile. They tried it for a week and they really liked it. They felt that management had responded to their concerns. After all, they all said, anyone who didn’t want to could drop out. They all agreed that it was a lot of fun.
The head of the company said he would like to keep the random selection device, since it seemed to be having a good effect on staff morale.
Joe said: “I’m sure you’ll appreciate that a lot of work has gone into this. Also, this is just a prototype and I’m concerned about releasing it too soon. But I appreciate your letting me work with your staff. They have been a lot of fun to work with. They’ve been a big help. I can let you have it for $1,000.”
The guy bought it.
Interesting.
LOOKING FOR HIGHLY QUALIFIED PROFESSIONALS
So far Joe hadn’t done much more than extend the spirit of the Christmas party throughout the year. He hadn’t broken any taboos, or at least not in a major way. But his confidence was up. Just succeeding in making a sale, and a sale, at that, of a product that wasn’t self-explanatory, like a vacuum cleaner, had boosted his confidence to the point where he felt able to tackle something more demanding.
So he went out on a limb.
He took an office in an expensive building for just one month.
He advertised some positions for which women might be expected to apply. They called for good qualifications and offered good salaries. Basically he had just plagiarized from ads by legitimate businesses.
A woman answered the ad and he gave her an appointment. She was not ballooning but it would not be the end of the world if she walked out. Good practice material.
He said: “I’m afraid the position you are applying for has been filled. I do have another one which calls for someone with your qualifications. The pay is good, we are offering $60,000 a year, but I have to say I’m very doubtful about mentioning it to you.”
The woman said: “Please go on.”
He said: “It involves an unusual range of responsibilities.”
She said: “Please go on.”
He said: “I’m sure you are aware of the dilemma the issue of sexual harassment poses for many employers. It is a source of very serious concern, and rightly so. A woman has the right to go into her place of work without being subjected to unwelcome attention of a sexual nature. A woman has the right to be assessed purely on the qualifications which are relevant to the job, and not on her sexual availability, for example.”
She said: “Do you mean, is it some sort of position as sexual harassment officer?”
He said: “Not exactly.”
He said: “As you know, many offices have introduced codes of practice in an effort to eliminate behavior which might lead to litigation. This is of limited value. Breaches are not reported. The persons it is meant to protect are not protected. At the same time the atmosphere of the office is poisoned. A cloud of suspicion hangs over the most innocent encounters.”
He added: “It is an unfortunate fact of life, also, that some of the worst offenders have been among the most successful in purely job-related terms. Employers are anxious not to lose the services of these valuable individuals.”
She said: “I don’t understand.”
He said: “Many firms are now supplementing their sexual harassment policies with what we call lightning rods.”
She said: “Lightning rods?”
He said: “Let me explain. Typically, a firm will have a range of openings for which women typically apply. They may choose to hire an individual for a limited range of tasks—word processing, xeroxing, and so on. But they may choose to pay an individual a very substantial premium—typically the amount of the original salary—to carry out these tasks and also act as a lightning rod. The individuals concerned would be randomly selected perhaps two or three times a week to provide contact of a sexual nature to selected members of the firm.”
She said: “What!”
He said: “It’s not for everybody. That’s why I hesitated to mention it to you. I think everyone would agree that if you could get double the salary for holding somebody’s hand a few times a week it would be a good deal. Perhaps one woman in a thousand would see this as no more than holding hands. We’re looking for that one in a thousand. I need hardly say that the difficulty of finding such individuals is reflected in the pay.”
She was staring at him and saying “I’ve never heard anything like it.”
She
said: “You mean it would be like the advertised job and you would also sleep with people?”
“No no no no no!”
Joe was horrified that she could even think such a thing.
He explained: “It is of the utmost importance to avoid anything approaching personal contact. Absolute confidentiality is essential. The man must never know which member of staff has been involved. The women must never know which man has been selected. Typically a cubicle is specially built leading off the men’s and women’s lavatories. The man is only ever in contact with the body below the waist.”
The woman seemed unconvinced.
Joe elaborated: “I should add that this confidentiality extends to the highest levels. The appointment of lightning rods is not made by personnel; it never appears on a woman’s file. They are administered by an exterior body. To all intents and purposes, as far as personnel is concerned, they are ordinary members of staff.”
The woman said distastefully that it was too much like prostitution and she would not like to work in a place where something like that was going on.
He said: “We are not looking for prostitutes. We are looking for highly qualified professionals.”
He said: “I have strong views on sexual harassment. A properly run organization protects its employees. You are better off working in an office with a system of lightning rods than in the type of environment which makes no realistic effort to manage the sexual impulses of its employees.”
The woman said suddenly: “How could the job advertised have been filled? The ad was in the paper yesterday.”
He said: “The fact is we are conducting a survey of attitudes.”
He said: “Thank you very much for cooperating. Would you be willing to take a few moments to complete a questionnaire?”
The woman said angrily that he had wasted too much of her time already.
So it was quite helpful. He let a few days go by before making any more appointments, and then he was able to say they had found what they wanted on the first day.
The next candidate was younger and blonde. He seated her at the computer for a word processing test and from his desk watched the material of her skirt which pulled tight when she sat down.
She tested at 70 wpm.
Joe explained the dilemma facing many companies today.
He added persuasively: “It’s not for me to tell people what their goals are.”
He said: “I believe women identify their own objectives. Why, I could tell you stories—we had one woman, a very bright gal, had her heart set on law school. She was looking at five, six years of night school. When I outlined the package we were offering she said, ‘That’s me taken care of then. In two years I can earn enough to pay for a full-time program.’ But it’s not just for the career-minded. Many women today find themselves bringing up a family alone. A woman with a young family to support may find herself working several jobs, evenings, weekends. Through no fault of her own she is not there to give the moral guidance of a responsible adult. The children drift into drugs, crime. If I can give a woman the opportunity to make her own choices you can bet I’m going to do it.”
She said: “I don’t know.”
He said: “It’s not for everyone. We’re looking for the kind of woman who is confident about herself. The kind of woman who has aims she wants to achieve. We’re looking for someone with maturity. We’re looking for someone who wants to make a real contribution to the company and expects to be compensated accordingly.”
She said: “I just don’t know what to say.”
He said: “Are you in a relationship?”
She said: “Well, no.”
You want to hear something scary?
You want to hear something really scary?
She bought it.
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 pussylickers? 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.