by Helen Dewitt
So from her point of view, lightning rods was ideal as a second career. At 17 she had hated the idea of a nine-to-five job, but at 27 she was able to see the attraction of a job that came with a healthcare plan and a pension plan and a reasonable guarantee of employment when she was 37 or even 47 or 57. There would obviously come a point when the lightning rod element of the job would be removed on grounds of seniority, but by that stage she would be qualified for a responsible mainstream position. Besides, the high earnings of the lightning rod segment of her working life would be reflected in her pension.
And besides. Quite apart from the long-term financial implications, in many ways lightning rod work was a lot less stressful than what she was used to. One of the things that gets on your nerves after a while is having to interact socially with people you wouldn’t choose to mix with if you had a choice. Not to mention having to watch physically unattractive people get undressed—that gets old real soon. Lightning Rods removed that whole factor of the equation. It was really only after it was gone that you realized how much of your life you’d spent with a big fake smile plastered across your face.
In the early stages, when nobody had heard of Lightning Rods, women who might have been interested in this kind of career move didn’t know it existed. Recruitment, as a result, was hugely labor-intensive, and even after the recruits had signed on they required a level of through-care which was not really in the spirit in which they had been invited to join in. Later, as word started to get around, things improved considerably. Lighting Rods started to attract a type of applicant who had already resolved whatever conflicts she might experience relating to providing a service with a sexual component. The numbers on the register continued to grow steadily but counseling costs leveled off. The ratio of recruitment time to successful applications fell dramatically. In many ways, the new development was a welcome one.
As is the way of these things, however, every silver lining has a cloud. As word spread through the mainstream sex industry of the opportunities available for women who were concerned about the future, it reached others with a different agenda.
People were not slow to see that there had to be openings for more than one operator in the new field. Naturally enough, however, they brought their own preconceptions with them, preconceptions formed in an industry with its own scale of values. Coming from that background, they were not always able to appreciate just what it was that Joe had been trying to achieve. They tended, as a rule, to focus on the economics of it, and, in many cases, to misunderstand what they saw, overlooking the value built into the system which was made possible by the economics.
Joe’s first challenger was a man who had started out in the escort agency business. Ray had escort agencies in ten major cities, and it was in that light that he automatically interpreted the lightning rod concept.
His first thought, before he had time to go into the concept in any detail, was just that this could offer a solution to a problem that sooner or later anyone who runs an escort agency is going to have to confront. The problem, essentially, is that you are dealing with a highly time-sensitive commodity. Every girl has a sell-by date, and unfortunately individuals may not necessarily have the degree of self-awareness which would enable them to recognize the arrival of that date and take appropriate action without input from a third party. Nobody wants to hurt anybody’s feelings, but if you have an agency with a reputation to uphold sooner or later you’re going to have to spend some time getting people to face facts.
That can be a difficult process, especially if someone is going to have to go through a period of financial readjustment as a result. You don’t like to see someone walk out the door knowing she is going to have to make some compromises. You don’t like to see someone walk in the door when it’s all ahead of her, knowing the kind of choices she is potentially going to have to make a few years down the line. There are, obviously, individuals who take the kind of financial precautions that mean they don’t have to make those choices when the time comes, but those individuals do tend to be in a minority, and unfortunately there is little you can do.
What Ray initially thought, anyway, was that a lightning rod agency could be a way of easing the girls over into a less time-sensitive environment. It had to be an environment that was less intolerant of physical deterioration than an escort agency; what that meant, obviously, was that there would be a window of opportunity which would give a girl the chance to capitalize on her experience while picking up some new skills. It was a more humane way of dealing with a problem that was not going to go away, and it also made good business sense. If a girl looks after herself she can have the body of a 25-year-old well into her thirties—problem is, the face is the first thing to age. Well, by the looks of things, anyone who did look after herself could go on profiting from it, and enabling her agency to profit, well after the age when she would otherwise have had to start being realistic about her expectations.
So he set up an agency with branches in the major cities where he already operated. He had a lot of contacts in the business community, and he was able to pitch the service at cost-conscious companies because he did not have the overheads in terms of counseling, recruitment, and so on. The only thing was that he did not achieve the level of integration of lightning rods into the workforce that Joe had aimed for, because it would be pretty obvious who in an office was going to the Ladies seven or eight times a day. Also, he never really grasped the intricacies of managing bifunctional personnel. He made the mistake early on of hiring one girl out as a bifunctional receptionist. Being an over-deployed lightning rod she had to be away from the switchboard on a more or less hourly basis, and the company went through the roof.
After a while he decided it was more trouble than it was worth.
Word of the new agency came to Joe’s ears, of course. Some of the girls who came to Lightning Rods had started out with Lightning Escorts, so Joe was able to get a pretty clear picture of what his rival had to offer. Frankly, it didn’t worry him. It wasn’t worth worrying about. It was only too obvious that the guy was totally out of his depth.
When Mel started out, on the other hand, he had a couple of escort agencies, but he also had a wider range of interests. What it meant was that he was able to see a basic difference between escort agency work and lightning rod work which had somehow been missed. An escort has to have personality to be successful; a lightning rod, on the other hand, keeps personality on the other side of the wall.
Then Mel looked into the economics of it, and he frankly couldn’t believe his eyes. Here you had apparently otherwise sane businessmen shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars, to provide staff with randomly accessed pussy. He kept adding up the figures and saying I don’t believe it. Finally he believed it. And as soon as he believed it he knew there had to be money in it.
The wastage in the system was so humongous that anyone who understood the first thing about business could undercut it by 50% and still make an obscene profit.
Because the first thing that struck Mel was that the guy who had dreamed all this up had confused two totally separate issues.
One issue was the question of protecting the anonymity of the men availing themselves of the facility. This was a valuable feature, no two ways about it. Instead of men going out and jeopardizing health and reputation you got everything safely boxed off so that release was available in a protected environment. The thing to remember is that you never want to entrust your health or reputation to the type of person who would provide paid sex in the first place. That’s a good rule of thumb. This was the first facility Mel had ever seen that even began to address that concern.
But the issue of protecting the anonymity of the personnel providing the service was a completely separate issue. Considered from a purely business point of view, there was no advantage to it whatsoever. In other words, there was no need to go to all the trouble and expense of incorporating highly qualified female staff into the scheme
at grotesquely inflated salaries. If you eliminated that constraint, you could have a specialized pool of talent already in position and constantly available throughout the day.
If you do that, you are instantly able to cast your net that much wider. Because you can then provide the facility within an office building serving a multitude of clients—many of them small companies that would not find it practical to have a lightning rod as a member of staff.
The thing that the guy who had come up with the idea had not seemed to realize was just how much pussy is out there, or how economically it can be provided. Because the guy had obviously come from a pretty sheltered background, so he did not understand the obstacles confronting many potential applicants. Say you take a woman who has made it into the country somehow, back home she wouldn’t even have an indoor toilet but here she has all kinds of conveniences you and I take for granted. Someone like that would count herself lucky to get the minimum wage for a forty-hour week, especially if for a lot of the time she just waited for people to come in. Well, if someone is willing to put in the work we should give them the chance to stand on their own two feet, because that’s what this country is all about.
Now if you have the potential to have the facility on demand, one thing you have to think about is the economics of it. The way he saw it was the economics of it were completely cock-eyed. Lots of companies provide a canteen for their staff, and they may even subsidize the meals, but they sure as hell don’t provide them free of charge.
What that meant was that there was a lot of scope for turning this into a credit on the balance sheet. For instance, you could offer a subscription which included so many uses of the facility per month. Guys who for whatever reason felt the need to make extensive use of the facility could pay accordingly, guys who weren’t interested could just leave it be.
The more he thought about it the more insanely underexploited potential leaped out and grabbed him by the balls. Any working girl knows a john likes to try things he can’t necessarily get from his girlfriend. Guys these days go online, they realize there’s more to life than pussy, there’s anal, there’s double, their girlfriend doesn’t see eye to eye, this is something they would expect a facility to accommodate. Why would a businessman try to penalize this expectation, when he could be getting bigger bucks for his bang? Get real, people.
So he drew up a proposal for a streamlined operation, and a lot of people who had been interested, but who had felt they could not go the whole nine yards, decided that it actually made a lot of sense.
THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN MONEY
There are people who would feel threatened by something like this. You go away on a business trip with a monopoly on an innovative product for helping firms negotiate the minefield of sexual harassment. You come back to find that not only do you not have a monopoly, but somebody else is offering a no-frills service for less than half the price. Many people would find that very, very threatening.
It’s not until something like this comes up that you find out what kind of a person you are. Joe came back from a business trip and one of his sidekicks broke the bad news, and it was obvious that Mitch was worried.
“I don’t have to tell you what this means, Joe,” said Mitch. “There’s a lot of people will find this very attractive. Especially the whole concept of having the guys pay for their use of the service, something like that is going to practically sell itself.”
“Well, let me have a look at my mail,” Joe said, just as if Mitch had announced nothing more serious than the death of an office plant. “See if anything interesting has come in.”
He went into his office and started opening letters, and the interesting thing was that he didn’t feel threatened in the slightest. What he actually felt was relief. Years later he would tell the story and people would never quite believe that you could feel that way when a hitherto unsuspected competitor has suddenly turned up to undercut you by 50%. That’s because most people don’t see the larger picture. They focus on what’s in front of their nose.
Most people never think about the fact that you only ever get one life to live, and a business is just a part of that life. If you don’t think about how your business fits into your life as a whole, one day you’re going to wake up and find you sold away the only life you were ever going to get for the sake of the bottom line. Well, there’s only so much money you can spend in this life, and the thing you’ve got to remember is, the one thing you can’t buy back, no matter how much money you have, is time. A billion dollars won’t buy back one single minute.
From a purely financial point of view, you can’t beat a monopoly. If people want the product, they have to come to you, and you can pretty much name your price.
But from the point of view of getting what you want out of life, it depends what the monopoly is.
If you have a monopoly on something that carries a lot of prestige, something that makes people look at you with respect, that’s fine and dandy. You also have the monopoly on all that prestige, and good luck to you.
But if you have a monopoly on something that people look at askance, it’s not so cut and dried. If your product is something that attracts a certain amount of odium, all that odium has only one place to go. It goes straight to you.
It doesn’t matter what precautions you may have taken to make sure the product has no undesirable side effects. People will just go on associating the product with all the undesirable side effects it would have had if you hadn’t taken those precautions. It’s no good reasoning with them, in fact you won’t ever get the chance to reason with them. They’ll just make up their minds out of prejudice, without even giving you a hearing, and the only thing you can do is learn to live with it.
But suppose someone comes along with a similar sort of product, only stripped of all the features that were built in to protect people from undesirable side effects. The product is cheaper, so a lot of people are going to be tempted. A lot of people are going to find, to their cost, what it means to have full-fledged prostitution going on right in the heart of their office. A lot of people are going to discover, too late, just what kind of effect that has on staff morale. They’ll find out just what it means for people to be working on a daily basis in that kind of degrading environment.
Gradually, word will get around.
Before you know it, you’ll be able to point to the unholy mess that ensues when you cut corners. The fact that you charge twice as much shows that you are offering a quality product, a BMW instead of a Datsun.
What Joe saw, in fact, was that the appearance of this sleazeball on the scene was the one thing wanting to give Lightning Rods, Inc. respectability. It wasn’t just that it would be the lesser of two evils. It would be seen as the champion of family values, of corporate ethics, of responsible business practice. Companies that might have hesitated to even let Joe in the door because of what people might think would now be calling him up. Because the fact was, he had a product no company could afford to be without. Now they’d be able to admit that.
What he saw was that this was his chance to be part of the mainstream. Because let’s face it, nobody likes to be a pariah. Nobody likes to be someone people can’t afford to be seen in public with. Nobody likes having to arrange a convenient time to meet when there’s no one around but the cleaners. Nobody likes having to lie about what they do.
What this cheapskate was doing was letting Joe off the hook. Joe had been carrying the can for close on four years now. He was almost thirty-seven. If he played his cards right, there was no reason why he shouldn’t spend the rest of his life as a respected member of the business community.
You can’t put a price on something like that. Once you’ve got enough money so you can have whatever you want without counting the cost, you don’t need to keep piling up more. You don’t need the business of 100% of all the companies in America; if you had it, you wouldn’t know what to do with it. Once you’ve got the money you need, you can start to think about all the other thin
gs that matter. For instance, suppose you could appear on the cover of Newsweek or Time magazine as Businessman of the Year? Suppose you could get an honorary degree from Harvard? You can’t buy something like that. You have to earn it by being perceived to be an outstanding individual. It’s not enough for you to be outstanding—other people have to recognize you for what you are. And here this piece of slime had upped and handed Joe a life of distinction on a platter.
Well, thanks for the favor, buddy. Sayonara, and see you in St. Louis.
Joe came out of his office when he had finished looking through his mail, and did his best to reassure Mitch. He didn’t say anything about the honorary degree from Harvard, which might not carry that much weight with Mitch—Mitch was a nice enough guy, but limited in his outlook. But he gave an inspiring pitch about BMWs and Datsuns, pointing out that people had never really fully appreciated the BMW until the Datsun came on the scene. He pointed out that Playboy had never really been seen as all that tasteful and intellectual until Hustler came along.
“I guess,” said Mitch.
“Mitch,” said Joe. “I want you to do something for me.”
“Sure, Joe,” said Mitch.
“I want you to go out and buy a copy of Playboy and a Hustler and read through the magazines, comparing the two. Look at the type of advertisers they’re attracting. Look at the type of article they’re running. And what I want you to do is ask yourself what type of reader each magazine is catering to. Then I want you to ask yourself what kind of implications you think that has for us. If you’re still worried, come back and talk to me and we’ll talk this through.”