was, he taught her that if you want something, you should just give it everything you’ve got. Don’t worry about looking dumb; don’t worry about what other people will think; just go for it.
What Ed would say was: “She’s a sweet kid.”
What he would think was that he would never have been crazy enough to buy 553 Magic Meals if he hadn’t have been in a state of advanced tit deprivation.
In later years, of course, features were standard which in the early days would have seemed inconceivable luxuries. Today a heater is standard in all cars. Time was when people would heat up a brick in the oven and wrap it in a towel. Today we take car radios for granted; well, the time is still within living memory when, if you wanted a radio in the car, you had to take it out of your living room and put it on the front seat. In the same way, users of the early lightning rods could not have imagined that one day a video panel at eye level would be standard; the idea that you would one day be able to choose between seeing the back and head of a virtual partner, or just getting an eyeful of breasts ranging from mango to melon, would have seemed unthinkable. In the early days users were expected to look after themselves. Soon the Men’s HFC had its own stash of magazines. Then Joe had the bright idea of providing the magazines, because he could get a good deal on bulk orders, and keeping them in a concealed compartment. He tried it out in Kansas City and when it proved popular he made it standard in all his installations, and that, if you can believe it, was what passed for high concept in 2000.
Whether a more sophisticated product would have made life easier for Ed Wilson will never be known. As it was, precisely because Ed Wilson was using the product so much more regularly than most clients, he was one of the first to become dissatisfied with its shortcomings. There comes a time when screwing someone from behind with nothing to look at but the wall gets stale; there comes a time when even screwing someone from behind while reading a magazine does more harm than good. All the magazine does is make you aware of all the features that are inaccessible because there’s a wall in the way.
Studies on the baboon in captivity have shown that primates in captivity take out their frustration on each other. Ed Wilson chose to take out his frustration on Roy.
From the point of view of Lightning Rods, he could not have chosen worse.
A Higher Power
THE BIG BREAK
Ironically, the thing that kicked Joe’s problems into the major league was the very thing that made him think there was now no stopping him, i.e. the fact that he got his first big break.
His first break, obviously, had been when he had found the one company in a thousand prepared to take an innovative approach to the problem of sexual harassment. But that was a break he had had to work for. He had had to write to 1,000 companies, and he had had to handle all the various forms that rejection can take from 999 of them.
But his first big break came through something he had done absolutely no work for at all.
What happened was that Borelco started attracting interest from a big player. Steve had built Borelco up over the years and did not want to see it swallowed whole. In a move to parry the acquisition, he entered into a merger of Borelco with a company about its own size, Namier & Swanson, Inc. Naturally all kinds of finagling had to go on as to how the employment conditions of the two companies were to be made commensurate.
One thing that Steve knew Borelco would have to bring along as part of its culture was the lightning rods, because the men who had grown accustomed to the facility would have bitterly resented being made to give it up after the merger. It would have caused everything to get off to a bad start. But it was not all that easy a subject to raise with the other side.
“Look, Steve,” said Joe, when the difficulty was explained. “If you want my honest opinion, there’s absolutely no point in going out of the way to make trouble for yourself. If you think about it, everybody just takes it