by Helen Dewitt
“Next thing you know they’ll be wanting me to put in a jacuzzi,” said Steve. “It’s not that I’m unsympathetic, but this kind of PC crap really gets my goat. Next thing you know they’ll be taking me to court for not installing a sauna.”
“You said it,” said Joe. His eyes scanned the room. “Now the way I see it,” he said, “is this could be modified to suit our purposes at a very reasonable cost. You said it backs onto the disabled cubicle in the Ladies; couldn’t be better. We knock a hole in the wall connecting the two compartments, and install an inconspicuous transporter for the gal. We also install a simple dispenser for condoms and lubricant, disguised as a unit for dispensing extra toilet rolls, and a simple disposal unit.”
“I think I need to think about it,” said Steve.
“You bet,” said Joe. He put his hands in his pockets. “You know, I really gotta hand it to you,” he said, surveying the cubicle. “You really provide a first-class facility. You may not know this, but not all disabled toilets provide a sink at the right level.”
“You don’t say,” said Steve.
“Of course, having a sink in the cubicle could be quite convenient from a hygienic point of view for individuals using the cubicle for purposes for which it was not originally designed,” said Joe. “We would hope that individuals would take care to clean up after themselves so as not to inconvenience or offend legitimate disabled users of the toilet.”
Steve laughed. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “Hell, I don’t know.”
He opened the door of the cubicle to pace up and down along the urinals.
“You may have a point,” he said. The fact that he had already agreed was neither here nor there, often it’s only after agreeing to buy something that a customer begins to realize how much he would like not to buy it.
“You should see some of the hot shots we get these days,” he said. “Straight out of college and they’re on a hundred grand a year. In my day you didn’t see that kind of money till you were thirty. In my day you thought you had something to prove. Well, you’d think the positive side of it would be you’d get staff who knew how to deal with liberated women. I know I’m too old to learn, but at that age they should have been growing up around women expecting to be treated as equals. Instead we get behavior that—well, all I can say is, we wouldn’t have expected to get away with it thirty years ago, and that was before they started taking people to court for opening a door or some damn thing.”
A good salesman knows when to let the customer do the talking. Joe waited sympathetically at the door to the disabled cubicle.
“I tell you frankly I’ve seen things that made my hair stand on end. The whole thing is a minefield. I’ve explained to a couple of the more egregious offenders that there are no certainties, the fact that a young woman is wearing high heels does not mean she can be guaranteed not to sue you. I don’t mind telling you that some of these men are a lawsuit waiting to happen. This idea of yours may not be in the best of taste, but from where I’m standing it looks like more of a solution to a genuine problem of nightmare proportions than anything else I’ve seen. To be honest, it’s something a man of my generation has trouble with, but the younger men are a different breed. We can’t do business without them, or we’ll lose our competitive edge; but I have to say I’m getting sick and tired of wondering when some girl is going to get awarded $1 million in damages because the firm didn’t protect her from their shenanigans. How the hell am I or anyone else supposed to protect her, for the love of Mike? Well, if they want protection I’ll give ’em protection. Send me a contract and we’ll get the builders in.”
3.
Trial Balloons
MORE HIGHLY QUALIFIED PROFESSIONALS
Joe had said he had well-qualified individuals who were ready to walk through the door, which in retrospect had been overstating the case somewhat. It was one of those things a salesman just has to say. You get a sense for what someone wants to hear, and sometimes there’s something that you just know is going to clinch the deal. You say what you have to say, and then afterwards you clear it with head office. If you yourself are head office it makes it easier in some ways, because you’re obviously not going to give yourself a lot of shit, but on the other hand in some ways it gives you a whole new perspective on what head office has to put up with. Because the buck stops here. Whatever it was you said you could do, you personally are going to have to do it.
Anyway he had to come up with staff fast.
While it was not strictly untrue that he had well-qualified individuals who were ready to walk through the door, the individuals who were ready to walk through the door had answered ads for permanent jobs. Most were not prepared to leave their present jobs for a six-month position with the possibility of renewal. Luckily one of the best qualified applicants, a very bright gal, well turned out, good skills, unflappable, hadn’t turned a hair when he explained the nature of the job, said she would be willing to take a six-month assignment on one condition.
“If at the end of the six months they decide not to go ahead with the program,” said Lucille, “I want the option of staying on in the position for an additional six months at a salary 30% above the notional rate for the position, or, alternatively, a separation fee equivalent to 30% of the salary for six months plus one month’s salary, to compensate for the inconvenience to me of having to look for another job for the second time in a year.”
Joe had to hand it to her, she was one tough cookie. As long as none of the other gals got wise it was no skin off his nose.
“You got it,” he said.
“I’d like that in writing, obviously,” said Lucille.
“You got it,” said Joe.
One thing that you soon learn in business is that you should learn from your mistakes and stop kicking yourself. Making mistakes is how we learn. If you’re not making any mistakes, chances are you’re not taking enough risks, and sometimes just not taking risks is the biggest mistake you can make.
That was what Joe told himself when he discovered that his hard work in recruiting eighteen other women who thought they could be the woman in a thousand had all been for nothing, because all eighteen had answered ads for permanent jobs. In retrospect, that had been a mistake. Granted. But there’s no point kicking a dead horse.
So he picked himself up and started recruiting again, and within a week he had five gals prepared to try it out on a six-month contract, plus another five for camouflage. He wrote a new software program for the occasion. And he prepared himself for the last hurdle: a series of motivational talks with the individuals whom the package was designed to benefit.
Joe knew he would have to talk to the first beneficiaries of the program himself. He was going to have to talk to them one at a time, and he was going to have to choose his words carefully. One thing was for sure, if he explained it to a group it would never get off the ground. Everybody would be looking at everybody else to see how they were reacting, and it would be touch and go.
What he did was he arranged a day of brief appointments with the men in question. He explained about the dangers of inadvertently committing sexual harassment in the modern office. He explained that research had shown that the highest-performing individuals in a company were often the very ones who were put at risk. He commented that the thing about drive is you either have it or you don’t, and if you have it you can’t just turn it off at the flick of a switch. He explained that in view of these findings the company was placing a facility at the disposal of its highest-ranking performers, on an experimental basis.
Participants would be offered the opportunity anywhere from two to five times a week at randomly generated times of finding release for any pent-up physical needs. A notification would appear on a participant’s computer screen. It would be entirely up to the participants whether they took action or not. Administrators of the program would have no information as to uptake on the part of individuals. Participation or non-participation would be entirely confidential.
As Joe spoke on, the client would, typically, not say anything at first in case it turned out to be a joke. So Joe would flesh out the rationale of the program with material on the baboon in captivity, amplifying if necessary with other findings in primatology. He would point out that the ventro-ventral, or so-called “missionary,” position was virtually unheard of among other primates; that the ventro-dorsal position, or mounting from behind, was the preferred method of entry among virtually every primate known to man; and that we ignore nature at our peril.
While the client digested this unfamiliar material, Joe would continue to outline the logistics. A participant who had received notification, he explained, would be entitled to make use of the facility at his own convenience at any time before the end of the working day, at which time, unfortunately, the entitlement would no longer be valid. Should the participant choose to avail himself of the opportunity, he could either accept immediately or select the LATER option on the menu, in which case he would be allowed to either specify a later time, or simply wait until a convenient moment occurred and then click on the I’M READY NOW icon.
Any form of acceptance, Joe would explain, would activate a notification for a lightning rod; if the time was convenient she would report for duty, if it was inconvenient she would return the assignment to the pool for someone else to pick up. The identity of the lightning rods would remain confidential at all times.
Someone like Bill Gates could probably do this amount of programming standing on his head, but for Joe it represented a real challenge. He would have appreciated some sign that his clients were impressed by the sophistication of the product. For the most part, though, they seemed to focus on other things.
In fact he knew from the first moment he set eyes on them that the guys were a bunch of assholes. They all reacted in exactly the same stupid way.
“Let me get this straight,” they would say. “The company is offering this as part of its sexual harassment policy? Hoo boy!”
He had to remind himself that these people were keeping him in business. It was the fact that they were assholes that had left the CEO of a competitive company at his wits’ end how to deal with them. If they hadn’t have been Grade A assholes the CEO would probably not have taken a giant step for mankind in being the first American executive to introduce lightning rods to the workplace.
Besides, the thing to remember was that it was probably not their fault that they were assholes. They were not to blame for their upbringing. All you had to do was talk to them to realize that these were people with no class. It wasn’t their fault. They had just been brought up that way. The way to look at it was, if a guy, through no fault of his own, has not been brought up to treat women with respect, is it fair that his whole career should be put in jeopardy? Is it fair that on top of the disadvantage he has anyway in competing against guys who have been to Harvard and Yale, he should have the additional handicap of endangering his career every time he is in the vicinity of female personnel?
No. That isn’t fair, and an egalitarian employer with a commitment to democracy will do everything in its power to remove the obstacles in the path of disadvantaged employees. Hell, they’re legally obligated to provide a disabled toilet, well just because the law doesn’t compel an employer to consider the needs of socially disadvantaged employees doesn’t mean an enlightened employer can’t be ahead of his time.
That was how Joe got himself through it as he talked to one prize asshole after another.
It was hard work, no two ways about it, but it was worth it.
Besides, it was nothing as compared to the almighty hassle of writing another software program.
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.