Lightning Rods - By Helen DeWitt Page 0,85

applications fell dramatically. In many ways, the new development was a welcome one.

As is the way of these things, however, every silver lining has a cloud. As word spread through the mainstream sex industry of the opportunities available for women who were concerned about the future, it reached others with a different agenda.

People were not slow to see that there had to be openings for more than one operator in the new field. Naturally enough, however, they brought their own preconceptions with them, preconceptions formed in an industry with its own scale of values. Coming from that background, they were not always able to appreciate just what it was that Joe had been trying to achieve. They tended, as a rule, to focus on the economics of it, and, in many cases, to misunderstand what they saw, overlooking the value built into the system which was made possible by the economics.

Joe’s first challenger was a man who had started out in the escort agency business. Ray had escort agencies in ten major cities, and it was in that light that he automatically interpreted the lightning rod concept.

His first thought, before he had time to go into the concept in any detail, was just that this could offer a solution to a problem that sooner or later anyone who runs an escort agency is going to have to confront. The problem, essentially, is that you are dealing with a highly time-sensitive commodity. Every girl has a sell-by date, and unfortunately individuals may not necessarily have the degree of self-awareness which would enable them to recognize the arrival of that date and take appropriate action without input from a third party. Nobody wants to hurt anybody’s feelings, but if you have an agency with a reputation to uphold sooner or later you’re going to have to spend some time getting people to face facts.

That can be a difficult process, especially if someone is going to have to go through a period of financial readjustment as a result. You don’t like to see someone walk out the door knowing she is going to have to make some compromises. You don’t like to see someone walk in the door when it’s all ahead of her, knowing the kind of choices she is potentially going to have to make a few years down the line. There are, obviously, individuals who take the kind of financial precautions that mean they don’t have to make those choices when the time comes, but those individuals do tend to be in a minority, and unfortunately there is little you can do.

What Ray initially thought, anyway, was that a lightning rod agency could be a way of easing the girls over into a less time-sensitive environment. It had to be an environment that was less intolerant of physical deterioration than an escort agency; what that meant, obviously, was that there would be a window of opportunity which would give a girl the chance to capitalize on her experience while picking up some new skills. It was a more humane way of dealing with a problem that was not going to go away, and it also made good business sense. If a girl looks after herself she can have the body of a 25-year-old well into her thirties—problem is, the face is the first thing to age. Well, by the looks of things, anyone who did look after herself could go on profiting from it, and enabling her agency to profit, well after the age when she would otherwise have had to start being realistic about her expectations.

So he set up an agency with branches in the major cities where he already operated. He had a lot of contacts in the business community, and he was able to pitch the service at cost-conscious companies because he did not have the overheads in terms of counseling, recruitment, and so on. The only thing was that he did not achieve the level of integration of lightning rods into the workforce that Joe had aimed for, because it would be pretty obvious who in an office was going to the Ladies seven or eight times a day. Also, he never really grasped the intricacies of managing bifunctional personnel. He made the mistake early on of hiring one girl out as a bifunctional receptionist. Being an over-deployed lightning rod she had to be away from the switchboard on a more or less hourly basis, and the company went through the roof.

After a while he decided