Lightning Rods Read Online Free PDF Page B

a trailer.
    If you’re Joe Schmoe in the trailer you tend to think if you got off your butt and got your act together you could have real girls just like the ones in the magazines. You wouldn’t have to do anything. They’d be yours for the asking. Well if it was actually like that you wouldn’t get guys trying to get off on behaving suggestively in the office.
    Well, if you have a situation where the top earner in a company still can’t get what he wants, and where he can jeopardize his career trying to get what he wants, jeopardizing the profits of the company in the process , you know there’s got to be money in it.
    “Well, I’ve enjoyed talking to you,” said Joe.
    “What are your plans?” said the girl.
    Joe was standing in front of her desk. Behind her desk the wall was a floor-to-ceiling mirror, with potted rubber plants along the base. In the mirror, between the rubber plants, he could see a guy wearing a tired brown polyester suit. It wasn’t rumpled or wrinkled because that’s the whole point of polyester. But it wasn’t crisp, either, because polyester does not have it in it to be crisp. The guy was standing there among the plants with this suit wilting on his shoulders. If a guy like that came up to you and tried to sell a vacuum cleaner you might feel sorry for him and offer him a piece of pumpkin pie, but you would not buy a vacuum cleaner. If a guy like that came up to you and made an innovative suggestion for rewarding the top earners in your company you would reject it out of hand. He was just the kind of guy you’d expect to come up with the kind of dirty idea that was totally inappropriate to your company.
    “I’m going to buy a new suit.”

2.

The Numbers Game

FIRST IMPRESSIONS
    Joe was the first to admit that he made a lot of mistakes when he started out. He worried about all the wrong things. The way he looked at it at first was, take it slow, build up gradually. So the first thing he decided to try, if you can believe it, was a kind of office-orientated version of Spin the Bottle.
    But one thing he got right was that it was important to look good. In the trailer he had only seen himself in the bathroom mirror that he used to shave in. Seeing himself in the office mirror had come as a shock. In fact it had made him wonder whether he had actually been sane when he bought that suit in the first place. Why would anybody buy a shit-colored suit? Why would that have seemed even momentarily a good idea? All right, it was on sale at the time. Originally a $99.99 suit, it had been reduced to $49.99 with choice of tie. But wouldn’t you think you would at least wonder why they hadn’t been able to sell it at $99.99? Wouldn’t you think you would look at it and think Oh, I’ll bet the reason they couldn’t sell it at $99.99 was that nobody wanted to buy a suit that went with their turds. But no, he’d just gone in and said, “Hey! $49.99! And it fits! And it’s 100% polyester so it won’t get wrinkled!” Jesus .
    Anyway, now that he had come to his senses he realized that for what he was trying to achieve it was impossible to look too good.
    He bought a thousand-dollar suit on the installment plan. It was a dark, silky charcoal, so dark it was almost black in certain lights. He bought a deep red silk tie. He bought ten white shirts and a pair of heavy silver cufflinks. He bought ten pairs of black silk socks. He bought a pair of three-hundred-dollar English shoes. He bought ten pairs of Jockey underpants and ten Jockey T-shirts because it’s important to be clean. He bought a box of crisp white handkerchiefs. It’s important not just to look like a rich man, but to feel the way a rich man feels in his clothes.
    Then he had some stationery printed up. He wrote to a lot of businesses in the area explaining that he was doing research in personal interaction in occupational psychology, and asking whether members of staff would be prepared to participate in a simple study.
    Seventy-five