by Helen Dewitt
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 kno
wn. 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.
LET THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY
Lucille had always thought of herself as pretty unflappable. The way she saw it was, she was the kind of person who could take things in her stride. She didn’t let things get to her. Whatever might be going on around her, she just got on with whatever it was she had to do. Also, she prided herself on her attention to detail. More specifically, she prided herself on paying attention to detail without getting obsessed about it. Basically she was the kind of person who could just get on with the job without making a fuss about it. Give her something to do and she would get the job done.
When she had started working she had taken all these things for granted. You’re there to do a job. So see what needs to be done, and do it. Can’t get much more obvious than that, right? Wrong.
What she had started realizing after a while was that most people just flew apart over things that she just took in her stride. The longer you work, the more you realize how many people can’t deal with things. Even if they’re paid to deal with them, they still can’t deal with them. So that somebody who just does what they’re paid to do really stands out.
Well, that’s fine. And it wasn’t that people had been unappreciative. People were always saying how much they appreciated working with someone they could trust to do the job right. They were always saying how great it was to work with someone who didn’t lose her head in a crisis. She’d worked in quite a few places, and each time word would get around and she’d be asked to help out by people she didn’t normally work for when something big came up, because if it was really big they wanted someone with an attention to detail who didn’t lose her head in a crisis. Fine.
It wasn’t exactly that the pay was bad, either. Her salary usually did reflect the value people put on her work. She would tend to be getting 20%, maybe 30% more than someone who was nominally in the same position—it wasn’t exactly that people weren’t prepared to put their money where their mouth was. And it wasn’t that she had to gouge it out of them, either. By the time she’d worked for someone a couple of months he couldn’t do enough for her; he’d be champing at the bit for the next chance to throw a bonus at her, or a raise. She’d never quit a job without being offered more money to stay.
The thing is, though, there’s recognition and recognition. The way Lucille saw it was, to be perfectly honest, she wasn’t 30% better than everybody else. What’s 30%, after all? Three-tenths. About a third. A third? I.e. her work was a third better than average? In your dreams. The way she saw it, she was about thirty times as good as the average PA, and ten times as good as the average senior PA, and she sure as heck wasn’t earning anything like that differential.
What actually tended to happen was she would end up picking up a lot of overtime.
In other words, the result of being head and shoulders above the rest was that she didn’t have a life to call her own.
What the new position seemed to offer, anyway, was some kind of recognition of the ability to take things in your stride. It was a way to parlay that ability into a remuneration package that went some way toward acknowledging its scarcity. In the longer term, it offered the chance to move up into a different sphere where her qualities would get something like their market value. Something about the woman who wanted to go to law school had struck a real chord. “What’s to stop me doing that?” Lucille had thought. “I could save up some money and go to Harvard Law School.”
The first few times were actually rather unpleasant. She had insisted on Joe putting in various safeguards which apparently hadn’t occurred to him, Joe not really being blessed with that kind of attention to detail. So she knew nothing could go seriously wrong. But there was something about taking off all your clothes below the waist and going backwards through a hole in the wall that felt quite uncomfortable. But the way she looked at it was, it was no different from what you put up with when you go to the gynaecologist. You just had to learn to take it in your stride. The way to look at it was, we all have to do things we don’t like in life. The important thing is to do something that offers appropriate compensation that enables you to do something you do want to do.
Besides, the thing to remember is there are two ways of looking at things you don’t like that life throws at you. One way is to emphasize the negative and just fall apart because every little thing isn’t exactly the way you like it. The other way is to look at it as an opportunity to practice dealing with things you don’t like. It’s a chance to practice not letting things get to you. You start out on little annoyances like the bus being late or running out of coffee when you don’t have time to go to the store, and you get to the point where you just don’t notice. Then you work up to slightly bigger annoyances, like just missing a bus when there won’t be another for an hour. You get to the point where you just take that in your stride. And each time something goes wrong you practice just dealing with the situation without getting worked up about it. If something comes along that you really don’t like, this is a chance to see how strong you are. If you can get through something potentially unpleasant without letting it interfere with your peace of mind, that tells you something about yourself. No matter what happens, nothing is going to drag you down. That’s an incredibly strong position to be in. You don’t get to that position by shrinking from a little unpleasantness.
So Lucille got through the first few weeks without any serious difficulties, and then Joe introduced the skirts. For some reason just the fact of wearing the skirt felt more protected somehow. From her own point of view, it was definitely an improvement. But the fact that she’d gotten through those first weeks without it meant she knew she could do anything, and that’s always a good thing to know.
The other early lightning rods found the practicalities of the job harder to adjust to. In later years, looking back on their experiences, a common theme was a feeling that they had been inadequately prepared. Basically Joe had just demonstrated how the message would appear on their screen and then taken them back to the disabled stall and demonstrated how the transporter worked, and that was it. Lucille by that stage had put it all behind her and was making a million a year as a litigation lawyer, but every once in a while she would pick up a paper and see a story about someone who hadn’t been able to put it behind her. Someone who had spent an unpleasant three weeks back in 1999 and had never recovered from the shock. Well, just reading between the lines Lucille could tell that this was someone who should never have gone in for that kind of work in the first place. If anyone had asked her, which they hadn’t, she’d have said it was a job where you definitely needed strength. To put pe
ople without that strength in the line of fire was just asking for trouble.
4.
As Fur as You Kin Go
WORD OF MOUTH
What Joe would explain, when later confronted with this kind of criticism, was that at the outset the success of the facility was by no means the foregone conclusion it might with hindsight appear. In an ideal world he would obviously have wanted to spend more time making sure no one was doing anything she didn’t feel comfortable with. Unfortunately our world is very far from ideal, sustainable client development was absolutely vital to the success of the business, and it was up to him to singlehandedly pursue that goal for all their sakes. Regrettably, he had had to make some difficult decisions. If the ship went down, they would all go down with it. So he had to make some tough choices.
So while the early lightning rods were going through a period of adjustment, Joe was back out there gunning for the product. He had sent out some more letters while the builders were working, and he had made some more pitches. Just the knowledge that he had actually made a sale and that installation was underway gave him an edge. You can fake confidence in the sense that you can put on a good show, but what you can’t fake is the inner confidence that comes from success. Because no matter what you say to the customer, you always know the score. If the score is Sales: 0, let’s face it: you’re going to have to put on one hell of a good show.
One thing that really boosted his confidence, anyway, was that about a month after he introduced the short skirts he got a couple of calls from some guys who played golf with Steve. Joe had been absolutely right: Once Steve had committed to the project he had wanted to convince himself he had done the right thing.