Lightning Rods (30 page)

“In fact, I don’t think this guy has thought things through. If you ask me, there are a lot of ramifications that he hasn’t even considered. As long as you have the full-service lightning rod installation, you have a way of removing any possibility of inappropriate contact. If a particular lightning rod happens to be related to a member of staff, you can ensure that the computer never generates that pairing. How’s
he
going to achieve that? As I understand it he’s offering supply on demand, it isn’t going to
be
computer-generated because a guy can just walk in any time day or night provided he’s prepared to pay. It’s just asking for trouble. Sooner or later you’re going to end up with someone accidentally paying for contact with his own flesh and blood. Well I’m sorry Joe, but that’s just plain wrong. No reputable company is going to want to be associated with something like that. I’m not saying he won’t find a market—there probably
are
people who’ll rush into something like that to cut costs, without thinking about the consequences. But there are plenty of companies that wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole.”

Wow
, thought Joe. He remembered all over again what it was that had attracted him to Lucille in the first place. She was one smart cookie. This was an absolutely brilliant point. It was bound to come in handy when his customers started asking how this other guy could offer the prices he was offering. The way he looked at it, it was practically unanswerable.

The really great thing about it was that it just helped to position Lightning Rods, Inc. as the defender of family values. I’ll take the high road and you take the low road, buddy, and I’ll be in Scotland afore ye.

Lucille looked imperiously around the room as if to say How dare someone do something that disgusting on the same
planet
. Joe had to hand it to her. The gal had style.

Partly because Joe was not spending much time there, there were not that many books in the room. There were some glass and chrome shelves on the same wall as the built-in sound system, and on them there were just the two CDs and a few paperback books. If you want to succeed in business it’s up to you to make the best possible use of your time; the thing you have to remember is, you’ll have
plenty
of time to catch up when you’ve made your pile. Think of all those hours you’ll have to kill in the nursing home—one day you’ll be glad you saved up something to do. But there are times when business is so stressful you have to get a grip on yourself, if you don’t
make
yourself unwind you’ll find yourself making bad decisions. Better to spend a couple of hours quietly reading—at least it doesn’t do any actual
harm
—than to rush around trying to plug holes in dikes that don’t exist.

This was the way Joe looked at it, and since he had been spending a lot of time on planes in the past year or so he had ended up doing quite a lot of reading. If he finished a book on the outward journey he usually just left it at the hotel, but if he brought it back with him he would put it on one of the shelves to give the living room a lived-in look.

Lucille was looking at the shelves without comment. Now her eyes swept away.

“Oh, you have the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
!” exclaimed Lucille.

As a former rep Joe had been able to get himself a good deal. It was a lot of money, but then you never know when you’re going to need to look something up—if you have a crazy schedule, you could do worse than just have a
Britannica
in the home. The Internet is a wonderful thing, but it multiplies a millionfold the dual hazards of creative reportage and fantasy enhancement; if you
need
the straight poop on some area of research which you have over-hastily sketched in for a client, the
Britannica
, with its team of accredited experts, will give you a wealth of bibliographical citations not easily refuted by casual recourse to the wackos at Wikipedia. In this type of eventuality focus is all-important; the apparent saving represented by an online subscription or CD, with the attendant opportunities for XXXX-rated distraction, may too easily prove a false economy.

Lucille stood up and walked over to the two-shelf unit provided for the work. She took out a volume of the
Micropaedia
and flipped it open to a page.

“I just love this old thing,” said Lucille. “When I was a kid I used to think it would be just wonderful to have one of my own. It just
smells
so good. It’s got that nice clean leather smell on the outside, and then on the inside that smell of clean new pages, it always smells as though you’re the first person to ever open to that particular page.”

Considering how rarely Joe had call to consult it, Lucille almost certainly
was
the first person to open to that particular page. “I know what you mean,” said Joe. “Sometimes I just open it to any old page just to see what’s on it.”

Lucille was reading her page with a smile. “You learn something new every day,” she said. “If you don’t mind my asking, how much does it actually cost?”

Old habits die hard.
Britannica
salesmen treat the price of the encyclopedia as classified information, to be released only to customers who have shown they can be trusted. “Oh, I got a special deal,” said Joe. “I don’t know
what
they’re asking these days.”

Lucille sat down on the unit. She crossed one leg over the other in the kind of movement that attracts a mental whistle. She opened the volume to another page. “All these people you never heard of,” she said. “All these facts. It makes you want to just curl up and read it for hours.”

Every salesman knows that it’s a numbers game. Joe suddenly realized that he was looking at exactly the kind of customer he had spent all those fruitless months in search of. If one person in twenty in Eureka, Mo. had had this kind of attitude, he would never have stopped selling encyclopedias in the first place. His whole life would have been different.

A salesman has to face facts; that’s one of the saddest things about the job. Because what you realize is just how many things are the way they are because people could not make a living out of appealing to people’s better nature. He himself had taken pride in selling the
Britannica
when he had first started out; the vacuum cleaners had been his second choice, and the lightning rods had been his third choice. We live in the kind of world where people end up with their third or fourth or fifth choice because there just isn’t the money in their first choice. Every once in a while you get this glimpse of what the world would be like, not if everyone was perfect, but if just a
few
more people were just a
little
bit better than they are. You get this glimpse of a world where people could get by, maybe not with their first choice, but with a close second.

Elroy came out from behind the sofa, whining softly. He came over to stand by Joe, and dropped the tennis ball temptingly on the floor.

Joe nudged it with his foot. Elroy snatched it up, growling and wagging his tail.

Joe thrust his hands in his pockets again. Snap out of it, Joe, he told himself. We don’t choose to be the way we are. There’s something in a dog that has evolved to get excited about a ball. For whatever reason, whatever it is that makes people get excited about the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
has evolved in relatively few people. The average man has evolved to be interested in sex more than the average woman. You’re making a living out of a world you didn’t make, out of people who evolved the way they happened to evolve. All you can ever do is try to increase the net sum of human happiness to the best of your ability.

I know, he said, but—

But nothing, he said. Sure it would be nice if there were more people like Lucille, but she’s a very special lady.

He remembered the spiel he had come up with in the early days about looking for the woman in a thousand. That was Lucille all right.

He was feeling kind of down, if the truth be told.

Lucille looked up. “Is anything the matter?” she asked.

“No, not really,” he said. He sat down on the unit, facing her across the open
Micropaedia
. “It’s a funny old world,” he said.

Elroy dropped his ball hopefully on the floor. Joe didn’t have the heart to get into the game. Lucille picked it up with a gingerly thumb and forefinger and tossed it away from her; Elroy scampered after it in hot pursuit.

Everyone gets discouraged from time to time. It’s what you do with it that counts. Joe sat looking rather glumly at the upside-down page, thinking about family values.

Sometimes your own mind can actually be more of a mystery to you than the most enigmatic of strangers.

He was just sitting there, thinking You have to deal with people the way they are. Not how they ought to be. That’s what being a successful businessman is all about.

All of a sudden he thought: But the reason they’re not how they ought to be is there are so many obstacles in the way. Most people want to do what’s right. It’s just hard. The more people sincerely want to do what’s right, the more important it is to help them. They have to accept the way they
are
, and learn to deal with it, if they’re ever going to stand a chance of improving.

And suddenly he had an incredibly brilliant idea.

GENIUS STRIKES AGAIN

Joe had thought of an idea so audacious only a genius or a lunatic could have come with it.

The idea was, what if it had been a mistake to concentrate initially on a secular environment?

Events were to prove that he was no lunatic.

He’d made a mistake. A
big
mistake.

But it took genius to
recognize
that mistake.

To be fair, sales is all about targeting.

It’s a numbers game.

Target, target, target, target.

Some people are always going to say no.

Now a good salesman can turn that no into a yes. Granted. The question is how long you have to spend turning a no around. A good salesman picks people who are likely to say yes without wasting his time.

Well, in his innocence, he had imagined that a highly Christian environment would not be amenable to the type of product he had to offer.

He said later that he could look back and weep.

One thing you learn in sales is never take anything for granted.

He was a long way from reaching saturation in the type of organization he started out on, but one thing you learn in sales is to look ahead.

Time doesn’t stand still.

Four years ago he had had the field all to himself; now suddenly out of a clear blue sky he had El Cheaparooney to contend with. It was time to move on to pastures new.

Well, if there was one segment of the market where El Cheapo didn’t have a hope in hell of finding takers, it was in that part of the country where people care about family values.

So he approached a couple of companies that he had left off his initial list.

What he did was he made most of the points he usually made, but he left out the material about the baboon.

Instead he made the point that a girl who has been brought up in a Christian home should not be subjected to inappropriate behavior and led into temptation at the office. A business has an obligation to protect the purity of its female staff. At the same time we are dealing with fallible human beings. A man may try to do right but fail. A business has an obligation to protect the men on its staff who while trying to follow Christ’s path suffer the weakness of the flesh. Which is better: to leave a man to consort with prostitutes, endangering his health and that of his family, endangering his reputation—knowing that if he is discovered the disgrace will ensure that the downward path is swift and sudden! Or to provide an outlet, a hygienic outlet for those carnal frailties?

Joe had been arguing of late, to clients in the secular community, that untold man-hours were being lost to the scourge of cyberporn, thereby making the physical release offered by Lightning Rods an indispensable safeguard to productivity. The argument proved surprisingly adaptable to the Christian setting.

“Remember,” he would say, “he that commits adultery in his heart has committed adultery as much as if he had done the deed. But a man who is afflicted by impure thoughts is drawn back again and again to the source of the poison. Is it not better that a man should commit a single impure act, in a couple of minutes, than that he should stain his thoughts with impurity for hours at a time? Is it not better, if he cannot resist temptation, to fornicate once in the flesh than a hundred times in the heart?”

With these words did he persuade both of the companies he approached. He was then able to tell new prospects that he knew of at least two companies with a strong commitment to Christian values which had implemented the scheme.

“Look at Mary Magdalene,” he would say. “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.”

AND AGAIN