Lightning Rods - By Helen DeWitt Page 0,18
He would be spotted by a talent scout, and in a few years he’d be playing at the Superbowl. And all because, throughout the game, the coach had the cheerleaders showing their pants in a routine that had more than its fair share of triple back flips. It was pretty good motivation for the rest of the team, too.
Joe lay on his side and he realized that he had gotten side-tracked yet again. Instead of beating up on himself, the way he usually would have, he just sent the victorious team back to the locker room for its reward.
Afterwards he sat up and put his feet on the floor. He thought suddenly Wait just a minute.
Something was bothering him.
It took him a while to put his finger on it. The thing that was bothering him was whether it could actually happen that way. Given the initial starting position of the cheerleaders. Because as he saw it those little short skirts definitely came ass backwards through the wall, allowing the team to go in for a quick forward pass. But it just didn’t seem realistic to have oral sex applied from behind, was that even possible?
Sometimes the best thing you can do with a fantasy is just accept that some of the details may be a little unrealistic. In the old days, before he started getting his life together, he would have thrashed out the problem just in case he might want to utilize the fantasy on some future occasion. Already he had moved on from that. The main thing was that he had gotten whatever it was out of his system. The fantasy, with all its undoubted flaws, had enabled him to achieve that.
There was a lesson to be learned from this.
Because as a salesman the question you have to ask yourself, when you do anything, is, “Why did I do that?” If you can find out the answer, you’ll understand just that much more about how other people tick, too.
He had thought he was prepared to face rejection, but the truth of the matter was it had been humiliating. The guy hadn’t even said anything. He’d just made up his mind that somebody who could come up with this kind of idea was some kind of human cockroach. You don’t waste time explaining to a cockroach that it’s not welcome, you just want it gotten out of the way without making a mess on the kitchen floor.
Well, it’s just a feature of the human psyche that when we undergo humiliation of some kind we tend to look for somebody else to humiliate, even if it’s just in our imagination.
“Well, let me ask you this, Joe. Do you think for one second that other people in that organization don’t face humiliation? Do you think people don’t fail? Do you think people aren’t made to feel inadequate? You know that’s not so.”
He looked at the thousand-dollar suit on its hanger.
“The only difference is, people in an organization tend to take out their humiliation on someone lower than themselves. One person is made to feel bad, and before you know it that feeling has been passed on, poisoning the atmosphere of the organization. Look at that study of baboons in captivity. The office is a form of captivity. The difference is, a baboon isn’t trying to achieve anything. Whereas people in the business world have a job to do. But when people go around taking out their frustrations on their subordinates, it impacts negatively on the way they do their job. It undermines their self-esteem, for a start. Maybe it makes them defensive, unwilling to take risks. Or maybe it makes them reckless, taking unnecessary risks. Maybe somebody never accepts their suggestions, so they just decide to present them with a fait accompli. Whereas if people had a way of siphoning off all that hostility they could go back to the office and get on with the job. But that’s exactly what a lightning rod offers the opportunity to do.
“So the lesson we can learn is, providing a safe outlet for sexual urges is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re offering people the chance to insulate their negative emotions, instead of directing their aggression and hostility at their colleagues. That’s a valuable service. Don’t you ever forget that.”
What he realized was that it was the fact that he was able to be humiliated that gave him such an insight into the reaction of the ordinary guy to a typical work environment.