Lightning Rods - By Helen DeWitt Page 0,39

in the alternative cubicle, and I, uh, I just wondered if you happened to know of such a thing.”

“No,” said Ian. “I don’t think I’ve ever come across anything like that.”

“Oh,” said Joe. “Oh, well, I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

“That’s all right,” said Ian. “Was there anything else?” He was obviously itching to go home and get back to The John Foster Dulles Book of Humor. Well, it takes all kinds to make a world.

“No,” said Joe. “Thanks for your help. That is, do you happen to know how I would get to the Hilton from here?”

“The Hilton?” said Ian. “That’s way across town. Were you planning to walk?”

“Unless you have a better idea,” said Joe. Interestingly, now that he was actually talking to the guy he was beginning to see that underneath all the shortness was a real human being. A human being who called John Foster Dulles JFD, but a human being for all that.

“I think your best bet is to go right back the way you came,” said Ian. “Fourth set of traffic lights, take a right, keep going, I think it’s a couple of blocks, could be three, you come to a strip mall with a KFC. You should be able to get a taxi there. Otherwise there’s the bus, but at this time of night they only come once an hour.”

“OK,” said Joe. “I think I got that. Fourth set of lights, right, two or three blocks. Thanks. You’ve been a big help.”

He turned back the way he came. Fourth set of lights, right, two blocks. No problem.

His mind returned to its current preoccupation.

Walking back toward the Kansas City Kentucky Fried Chicken, carrying his carry-on luggage, Joe realized that he had had a very narrow escape.

For some reason, the whole time he’d been thinking about lightning rods he’d been thinking of people using the facility as people pretty much like himself. He hadn’t anticipated users in wheelchairs. He hadn’t anticipated users of significantly lower height. Well, in this day and age you can’t afford not to anticipate that kind of eventuality. There is absolutely no reason why someone in one of those categories should not be the kind of high-performance results-orientated individual whose services a company would want to retain. Which means any facilities made available to other employees have to be potentially available to individuals in the relevant categories.

Besides, there was more to it than just some kind of abstract fairness. If you think about it, it stands to reason a disabled person is going to spend a lot of time being frustrated. A guy who spends his life climbing up onto bus seats is going to be frustrated a lot of the time. And it stands to reason that sexual frustration is going to be part of the package. Which means that these are individuals who could well benefit from access to lightning rods, if their employer has not been too blinkered by his preconceptions to provide it.

The other thing he realized was that this adjustable toilet idea had real potential, even apart from solving his own particular disabled toilet problem. Why wasn’t something like that widely available? This could be his own small contribution to easing the lives of people whose needs were too readily overlooked. He could insist on an adjustable toilet being part of every lightning rod installation; sooner or later, you just knew something like that would catch on. Think how much mothers with little kids would appreciate it. In fact, if the whole lightning rod thing didn’t take off, he could just concentrate on developing and marketing his adjustable toilet.

And the third thing he realized was that he now knew why it was that he had never made a career out of sales. All right, he’d had his successes, but something just hadn’t clicked, and now he knew why. Basically, he wasn’t a salesman. He was an ideas man. And those are two very different animals. He just happened to have a talent for thinking up things no one had thought of before, and then persuading people that something they hadn’t happened to have thought of was indispensable. Sales is obviously a part of that. A big part. But it’s only part of a larger whole. And the thing that made that whole possible was that knack for coming up with ideas.

Having come up with the idea of the adjustable toilet, Joe was able to sell it to Jerry without too much trouble. Jerry said he thought