Lightning Rods - By Helen DeWitt Page 0,41

away, there were millions of kids in the world and the situation wasn’t likely to change so what was the problem? In some ways Joe was tempted to just leave the whole lightning rods thing and go with the new idea, which obviously had huge potential since nothing like it had ever been tried before.

The problem was, there’s a difference between selling a solution to a perceived problem and selling a solution to something that is not perceived as a problem. People perceive million-dollar sexual harassment suits as a problem. They do not perceive the struggles of persons of short height as a problem, or at least, if it is a problem, it’s not their problem. So whereas Joe knew that as long as he stuck with the lightning rods cash flow would not be a problem, he also knew, unfortunately, that if he put all his eggs in the basket of the adjustable toilet he’d be back killing time in a trailer before you could say Jack Robinson—without even the chance of a free pumpkin pie.

Still, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Joe always made a point of having complete control over his lightning rod installations, and he had now made a vow to have height-friendly facilities in every single one. The way he saw it was, if the lightning rods took off the way it was starting to look like they were going to, the adjustable features would gradually become familiar to people, and sooner or later they would just be standard in all public conveniences.

And in the meantime, the disabled toilet was a real weight off his mind. With his new installations what happened was, the same mechanism that activated the transporter automatically took the toilet right down into the floor, where a sliding panel covered it for the duration. Since he was starting from scratch, he was also able to achieve an ambience that was a little less clinical than the one he had had to offer his original clients.

Unfortunately nobody has worked out a way to be two places at the same time. While Joe was otherwise occupied, the pot was starting to notice that no one was watching.

TROUBLE

If you’re in personnel one of the things you learn is never to be surprised by anything people do. Because it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in the business, you think you’ve seen everything, and they can still surprise you.

This applies even more if you have been in personnel since the days when it was called personnel. If you have spent a lifetime dealing with people, at first in the context of a personnel department, and later, moving with the times, in a human resources task force, you get to the point where you think there’s nothing new they can throw at you. You’ve seen the nicest people you could imagine engaging in systematic theft of supplies, you’ve seen the shameless use of the office phone to distant parts of the globe, and again it’s often the nicest people who are the guilty parties. The fact is there is something about an office environment that tempts people to operate with a completely different moral code from the one they were brought up with. If they actually were brought up with a moral code, which to be honest sometimes you really have to wonder.

Roy had been dealing with people, one way and another, for over thirty years, so it did not surprise him to discover that something was going on. If you’re used to dealing with people you know how important it is not to let abuses go unchecked. If something irregular gets established and taken for granted, to the point where everybody does it, you are only going to be able to stamp it out with a lot of bad feeling. An experienced human resources operator knows the cost of bad feeling. Sometimes it’s the price you have to pay. But it does come with a price tag, make no mistake about that, so if you can stamp out whatever it is before people have started thinking of it as a God-given right, believe you me you had better hop to it.

Roy was not surprised to find that something was afoot. But in spite of all his years dealing with humans in all their manifold variety, what that something might be never crossed his mind in his wildest dreams.

What happened was that Roy, over the years, had taken to using the disabled cubicle