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