by Helen Dewitt
Most American kids know this instinctively, which is why they’re so often caught off-base when asked without warning to name the capital of Peru. They know that if it comes to the crunch, and they actually need to know the name of the capital of Peru, they can quickly retrieve the information from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But there are more important things in life than impromptu identification of obscure foreign capitals, and when it comes to those things Americans are second to none. When it comes to making somebody feel good who is going to give you hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of business, an American will be shaking hands on the deal while the smart-ass is still waiting for a round of applause because he knew whatever it was without having to look it up.
The main thing was that the adjustable toilet was a done deal. And for that, Joe would have sung just as wholeheartedly in Kansas City, Mars.
The result was the Joe was much busier than he had expected to be just getting Jerry’s outfit up and running. He had to fly out to recruit unifunctional staff, and then he had to fly back to get the prototype toilet installed, and what with one thing and another he wasn’t really able to keep his finger on the pulse at his first installation. He had other things on his mind. Joe gradually got more and more involved in his adjustable toilet project over in the Big K, and by the time the whole installation was in place the cubicle also featured an adjustable sink, an adjustable hand dryer, and an adjustable towel rack, not to mention an adjustable condom and lubricant dispenser and adjustable transporter. The place was so designed that a person of sub-average height would be just as comfortable as anybody else. Joe kept wishing there was some way he could track down Ian and show him what he’d accomplished, since he was probably the only person Joe knew who was capable of appreciating it.
It wasn’t that Joe was spending all his time in the Big K, obviously. He was back and forth. But that was where the focus of his attention was. For some reason, the more he worked on the project, the more aware he became of just how unique it was in terms of the world at large. Every company is required to have conveniences for disabled users, but if somebody happens to be an unusual size the message is “Why didn’t you go before you left home?”
In some ways it was easier to get fired up about something like this than it was about the actual lightning rods. With the lightning rods, in a sense you were protecting people from something that was no fault of their own, i.e. a tendency to insult female staff through some kind of testosteronal imbalance. But that does seem to be something people could in some sense do something about. Whereas what kind of a world is it that acts like height was something you could change if you had the willpower? It wasn’t even as if you were talking about a minority, or something you were expecting to go away, there were millions of kids in the world and the situation wasn’t likely to change so what was the problem? In some ways Joe was tempted to just leave the whole lightning rods thing and go with the new idea, which obviously had huge potential since nothing like it had ever been tried before.
The problem was, there’s a difference between selling a solution to a perceived problem and selling a solution to something that is not perceived as a problem. People perceive million-dollar sexual harassment suits as a problem. They do not perceive the struggles of persons of short height as a problem, or at least, if it is a problem, it’s not their problem. So whereas Joe knew that as long as he stuck with the lightning rods cash flow would not be a problem, he also knew, unfortunately, that if he put all his eggs in the basket of the adjustable toilet he’d be back killing time in a trailer before you could say Jack Robinson—without even the chance of a free pumpkin pie.
Still, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Joe always made a point of having complete control over his lightning rod installations, and he had now made a vow to have height-friendly facilities in every single one. The way he saw it was, if the lightning rods took off the way it was starting to look like they were going to, the adjustable features would gradually become familiar to people, and sooner or later they would just be standard in all public conveniences.
And in the meantime, the disabled toilet was a real weight off his mind. With his new installations what happened was, the same mechanism that activated the transporter automatically took the toilet right down into the floor, where a sliding panel covered it for the duration. Since he was starting from scratch, he was also able to achieve an ambience that was a little less clinical than the one he had had to offer his original clients.
Unfortunately nobody has worked out a way to be two places at the same time. While Joe was otherwise occupied, the pot was starting to notice that no one was watching.
TROUBLE
If you’re in personnel one of the things you learn is never to be surprised by anything people do. Because it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in the business, you think you’ve seen everything, and they can still surprise you.
This applies even more if you have been in personnel since the days when it was called personnel. If you have spent a lifetime dealing with people, at first in the context of a personnel department, and later, moving with the times, in a human resources task force, you get to the point where you think there’s nothing new they can throw at you. You’ve seen the nicest people you could imagine engaging in systematic theft of supplies, you’ve seen the shameless use of the office phone to distant parts of the globe, and again it’s often the nicest people who are the guilty parties. The fact is there is something about an office environment that tempts people to operate with a completely different moral code from the one they were brought up with. If they actually were brought up with a moral code, which to be honest sometimes you really have to wonder.
Roy had been dealing with people, one way and another, for over thirty years, so it did not surprise him to discover that something was going on. If you’re used to dealing with people you know how important it is not to let abuses go unchecked. If something irregular gets established and taken for granted, to the point where everybody does it, you are only going to be able to stamp it out with a lot of bad feeling. An experienced human resources operator knows the cost of bad feeling. Sometimes it’s the price you have to pay. But it does come with a price tag, make no mistake about that, so if you can stamp out whatever it is before people have started thinking of it as a God-given right, believe you me you had better hop to it.
Roy was not surprised to find that something was afoot. But in spite of all his years dealing with humans in all their manifold variety, what that something might be never crossed his mind in his wildest dreams.
What happened was that Roy, over the years, had taken to using the disabled cubicle in the Men’s. Even as a boy Roy had been what the Sears Roebuck catalog called husky, and over the years he had gone on quietly expanding. Sears did not have a name for adult men with a six-foot waist, and eventually Roy had had to stop ordering his clothes from a catalog; for a while he had taken to buying his clothes at Walmart. Then he had come to his senses. As a personnel officer he knew none better that it’s important to accept yourself the way you are. If you look at Minnesota Fats in the movie The Hustler, Minnesota Fats is actually better dressed than the Paul Newman character. Fats knew he was the best, and he dressed the part. So Roy had bought a five-hundred-dollar tailored suit at a time when five hundred dollars was a lot of money, and he always flew first class when he flew, and he always used the disabled cubicle in the Men’s Room.
One day he was sitting on the toilet in the disabled cubicle, taking his time, when a couple of guys walked in and started taking a leak. One of them laughed to the other, “Jeez, it’s fucking 9:15 and somebody’s on a disability. Hoo boy.”
That was all Roy heard. He got up with help from the bar, and thought no more of it. But the next day he was in the cubicle and a couple of guys came in and they were talking again.
One said he was going to take his disability and call it quits for the day.
The other guy said, “Hoo boy.”
Now what Roy naturally thought was that this was some kind of variation on calling in sick for the day. The fact that this practice, whatever it might be, had developed its own slang, showed how far things had spread. Something was afoot that was going to have to be nipped in the bud.
The first thing Roy did was to go back to his office and check up on absenteeism patterns in the past month. Plenty of men his age swore at computers. Roy swore by them. You could get an overall picture of what was going on in a place of work in five minutes that you couldn’t have gotten in a year fifteen years ago. The thing to remember is, a computer is a tool. It’s there to help you do what you want to do. Used properly, a computer can be a valuable aid in determining what exactly it is that you want to do. But at the end of the day it’s just something to take care of things that would bore a human because they would take too long. It’s a machine, if you will. Neither more nor less.
Anyway, in five minutes Roy had gotten a picture of absenteeism in the past month that had him staring and scratching his head. “Holy son of a gun,” said Roy, looking at the little chart the computer had produced on his screen. In thirty years he’d never seen anything like it.
Absenteeism in the firm had reached an all-time low. In a building that housed 500 employees, ten had had a sick day in the last month. The rate was the same for the previous month. Roy went back six months. Month after month it was the same story. Then six months ago the figures were back up to where he would have expected them to be.
Something had been going on for six months and it had taken him completely by surprise.
“Holy moly,” said Roy. He took out one of the jumbo bags of peanut M&M’s that he kept in his bottom drawer and tore a small hole in the corner.
He decided that today he would start with green.
He shook a few M&M’s onto his pad, ate the green one, and put the rest in a bowl.
“Darned if I ever seen anything like it,” he said, popping another green M&M and tossing a few more into the bowl.
One of the great things about a computer is it can tell you just about anything you might want to know without even getting up out of your chair. All you have to do is ask it the right question is all.
Roy decided that he would do a breakdown by number of days off work. He got through three or four M&M’s setting up the search parameters, and then he ran the search.
“Jumping Jehoshophat!” exclaimed Roy.
Nobody had been off work for more than one day except a guy who had broken his leg.
He ran a search according to age without throwing up anything of interest. Then he ran a search by department and that didn’t throw up anything either.
Roy ate five green peanut M&M’s and swept a confused jumble of yellow, brown, red, and blue M&M’s into the bowl.
Roy always saved the blue for last. When he was down to the blue he would put them in a separate bowl and put it out at Reception for visitors to help themselves to. No matter how many visitors they had the level in the bowl never went down that fast. It just went to show what a mistake Mars had made in departing from its tried-and-true formula. You couldn’t blame them for trying, but Roy couldn’t help wishing someone in that company would be man enough to admit he had made a mistake.
Roy decided to run a search by sex.
“Well waddya know,” said Roy. Nine of the ten sick employees were women. The tenth was the guy who had broken his leg.
For some reason male employees were finding it a lot more appealing to come in to work than they had six months ago. But as a matter of fact so were the female employees. Because even nine in a month was significantly down on the number of female employees who had been off sick six months ago.
“Huh,” said Roy.
He spread out the rest of the bag of M&M’s on his desk, finished off the greens, put the rest in the bowl, and pondered.
He decided to start on the reds.
Half an hour later Roy came out of his office carrying a bowl of blue peanut M&M’s.
“Care for a peanut M&M, Stell?” he said to his secretary, or personal assistant as they called them these days.
“No thanks, Roy,” said Stella.
Roy wished the manufacturers could hear her. Maybe then they’d rethink this newfangled shade of M&M which they had foisted on a reluctant public.
“Stell,” said Roy, wondering how to phrase this. “Have you noticed anything unusual or out of the way in the office recently? Say in the last six months?”
“I can’t say that I have,” she said. “What kind of thing did you have in mind?”
“Well, I don’t exactly know, for sure,” said Roy, absentmindedly eating a blue peanut M&M. He was not entirely surprised by the response. In Roy’s opinion the thing to look for in a secretary, or personal assistant, was the ability to take each day as it comes. You don’t want Einstein. If by some accident you end up with Einstein, you’re in trouble. Big trouble. Any personnel officer will tell you the same. Stella was no Sherlock Holmes, but then he hadn’t hired her to be Sherlock Holmes. One of the first rules of recruitment is that if you hire someone to not have certain qualities because you perceive those qualities to be inimical to the satisfactory fulfillment of the job requirements, you should not then turn around and blame the person for not having the qualities you chose them not to have in the first place. It may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how many people forget this seemingly obvious fact in the heat of the moment.
Roy decided to inconspicuously wander around before going to Reception.
“Hi, Roy,” said Lucille, not looking up from her terminal. The tread of the head of human resources, so reminiscent of that of an approaching elephant, had been familiar to her by the end of the first week on the job.
“Peanut M&M?” offered Roy.
“No thanks,” Lucille said politely.
Roy only wished the manufacturers could hear.
“Peanut M&M, Stephanie?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” said Stephanie.
“Take all you want,” urged Roy. “I’m just taking them over to Reception.”
Stephanie took four. The phone rang.
“Peter Drake’s office, how may I help you?”
Lucille didn’t know whether the new girl was a lightning rod or not. She liked it that way. It meant for once Joe was doing his job.
Roy hesitated, then moved on to a cluster of desks where no one was on the phone. Lucille took the opportunity to write on the back of a message pad “I wouldn’t eat those if I were you.”
Stephanie hung up. “Whyever not?” she asked.
Lucille raised an eyebrow. “He goes through the whole bag,” she said. “Color by color. So by the time he’s gotten down to the blues he’s got to have handled them all about four times. One for each color. Then he takes them to Reception. Can you imagine?”
The new girl made a face. “Gross me out,” she said. She surreptitiously slipped the M&M’s into her trash can. “Oh my God, I think he saw me,” she said.
Roy realized that the girl had only accepted to be polite. The manufacturers just did not seem to have realized that it wasn’t just him. Nobody wanted to eat the damn things.
Men were walking between the desks here and there. Was it his imagination, or were they walking with a jauntier step?
Was it his imagination, or was there a different atmosphere about the place?
Roy absentmindedly ate another blue M&M.
The thing was, if morale had improved that was obviously all to the good, but whatever it was it was important for human resources to be kept apprised. Because whatever it was was something human resources could probably improve on. That was why it was important to keep your finger on the pulse. Otherwise you ended up with amateurs, who didn’t really understand what was involved in dealing with people, dealing with issues they didn’t fully understand. So that later, when things had gotten out of control, it was left to the boys in human resources to pick up the pieces.
On an impulse,
Roy stopped off at the desk of Laura Carter, who was secretary, or rather team support coordinator, to two of the younger marketing men. Laura had gone through a bad patch about nine months ago. She had been off sick two and three days a week, and while there was always a valid medical excuse there was a pattern that a blind man could have seen.
What’s more, you didn’t have to be a genius to see that there was something about the sense of humor of the team that Laura had had trouble adjusting to. Things that members of the team had meant to be taken in the spirit in which they were intended had unintentionally caused offense, and unfortunately one or two members of the team had seen that they had touched a raw spot and had not been able to resist teasing the girl in a way they probably wouldn’t have if she had appeared not to mind. Ed Wilson, for example, had an exuberant way about him that most of the girls just took in their stride. Laura, for some reason, had had trouble handling it.
Well, Roy had happened to look at the names of the people who had been off sick in the last six months—this kind of thing comes as second nature to an old personnel hand—and one of the things he had noticed instantly was that Laura was not among them. Some people think that with all the hundreds of people in an organization there’s no way one man could keep track of them all. They’d be surprised. If you’ve been in the business long enough there’s precious little escapes you.
“Hi, Roy,” said Laura, not looking up from her screen.
“Hi, Laura,” said Roy. He noticed that Ed Wilson was not in his office. So much the better. “How’s every little thing?”
“Just fine, Roy,” said Laura. “I won’t stop if you don’t mind, I’m just finishing this off for Ed.”
“You go right ahead,” said Roy. “Care for an M&M?”
“I won’t just this minute, thanks,” said Laura.
You see? thought Roy.
“It’s good to see you looking so well,” said Roy. “It can take some time to adjust to the pressure of a job like this. Sometimes it takes people a while to settle down.”