rough patch. The way the guinea pigs saw it was, you don’t expect Vitamin C to taste like an orange. You take it because it’s good for you. And after they’d tried it a few times they didn’t really notice most of the features that at first had seemed strange.
Then Joe introduced the short skirts and the high heels and the whole thing took off.
But one of the things that people commented on later was just how little had been done to prepare people psychologically for the kind of outspread a scheme like this might have. In the early stages virtually nothing was known about the effect of using lightning rods on individuals whom the facility was meant to protect. The least Joe could have done, people felt, was to monitor participants carefully for adverse collaterals. One of the many things people couldn’t get their heads around was the fact that Joe had basically gone into business after a single study involving getting members of an office to play computerized Spin the Bottle. And frankly, to call it a study was stretching it. Basically all he’d been doing was seeing what he could get away with. Responsible employment psychology this was not.
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