Lightning Rods (13 page)

“As in ‘I like Ike.’ It was his slogan when he ran for president.”

“You don’t say. Now I never knew that.”

“Where you from, anyway?” asked Ian, which was exactly what Joe had been wondering.

“Well, I’ve been all over the place, but I was born in Keene, New Hampshire.”

Joe mulled this over. Maybe Kansas wasn’t so strange after all. Maybe Keene, New Hampshire was the outpost of the Twilight Zone.

Ian closed his book and stuck it in the pocket of his carry-on bag. “I’ve never been that far east, myself,” he said. “I hear the autumn leaves are quite a sight.”

“They certainly are,” said Paul. “They’re a sight to behold.”

“Well, it’s been nice talking to you,” said Ian. “This is where I get off.” He pushed a button in the pole by the seat. The bus pulled to a stop. “Hope you enjoy your stay in Kansas City.”

“Why, thank you,” said Paul. “And the same to you.”

Ian got off the bus. The bus moved on.

Joe thought suddenly: Instead of a
fixed
alternative toilet, what we need is something with an adjustable
height
, like a dentist’s chair! Something you could pump up and down! Or maybe just raise electronically! But if you can raise it up and down, what’s to stop you from taking it
right
down? So it’s completely out of sight! Under a panel in the floor! Should the cubicle be required for some
other
purpose, such as answering a call of a
different
nature!

And he thought: Maybe the adjustable height toilet
already
exists
!

The bus was moving swiftly down a broad, straight, empty street with no traffic to get in its way. Every second was bearing him further away from someone who would almost certainly have the answer to this crucial question.

Joe sprang into action. “
Driver
!” he shouted. “
Stop the bus! That was where I wanted to get off!
”

“I thought you said you wanted the Hilton,” said the driver, with the helpfulness for which Jayhawkers are famous.

“I need the exercise!” said Joe desperately, while the bus bore him further and further along.

“I can let you off at the next stop,” said the driver.

“I think I’m going to throw up!” said Joe, clapping a hand over his mouth.

The bus pulled silently to the curb.

Joe could tell the driver knew he was lying and was just too polite to say so. He hurtled out the door before the driver could change his mind.

He turned and ran back in the direction of the last stop, cursing his carry-on luggage.

One good thing was that Ian would not have covered a lot of ground in the interim.

Sure enough, five minutes of sprinting brought him gasping up behind an unmistakable figure.

“Wait!” gasped Joe. “Wait!”

And he stopped at last, panting, by his side.

“Can I help you?” asked Ian.

“I hope so,” panted Joe. He stood panting. He really needed to be getting more exercise. Maybe he should lay in a supply of Special K. Walk to the store instead of taking the car. Or maybe more serious measures were called for. Join a gym. Work out for an hour every day . . .

“Uh,” said Joe. No way this was not going to be embarrassing. “Please don’t take this the wrong way,” he said. “I, uh, I’m helping a friend who’s opening an office here. I, uh, I thought as long as we’re starting from scratch we should have a toilet with adjustable height in the alternative cubicle, and I, uh, I just wondered if you happened to know of such a thing.”

“No,” said Ian. “I don’t think I’ve ever come across anything like that.”

“Oh,” said Joe. “Oh, well, I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

“That’s all right,” said Ian. “Was there anything else?” He was obviously itching to go home and get back to
The John Foster Dulles Book of Humor.
Well, it takes all kinds to make a world.

“No,” said Joe. “Thanks for your help. That is, do you happen to know how I would get to the Hilton from here?”

“The
Hilton
?” said Ian. “That’s
way
across town. Were you planning to walk?”

“Unless you have a better idea,” said Joe. Interestingly, now that he was actually talking to the guy he was beginning to see that underneath all the shortness was a real human being. A human being who called John Foster Dulles JFD, but a human being for all that.

“I think your best bet is to go right back the way you came,” said Ian. “Fourth set of traffic lights, take a right, keep going, I think it’s a couple of blocks, could be three, you come to a strip mall with a KFC. You should be able to get a taxi there. Otherwise there’s the bus, but at this time of night they only come once an hour.”

“OK,” said Joe. “I think I got that. Fourth set of lights, right, two or three blocks. Thanks. You’ve been a big help.”

He turned back the way he came. Fourth set of lights, right, two blocks. No problem.

His mind returned to its current preoccupation.

Walking back toward the Kansas City Kentucky Fried Chicken, carrying his carry-on luggage, Joe realized that he had had a very narrow escape.

For some reason, the whole time he’d been thinking about lightning rods he’d been thinking of people using the facility as people pretty much like himself. He hadn’t anticipated users in wheelchairs. He hadn’t anticipated users of significantly lower height. Well, in this day and age you can’t afford not to anticipate that kind of eventuality. There is absolutely no reason why someone in one of those categories should not be the kind of high-performance results-orientated individual whose services a company would want to retain. Which means any facilities made available to other employees have to be potentially available to individuals in the relevant categories.

Besides, there was more to it than just some kind of abstract fairness. If you think about it, it stands to reason a disabled person is going to spend a lot of time being frustrated. A guy who spends his life climbing up onto bus seats is going to be frustrated a lot of the time. And it stands to reason that sexual frustration is going to be part of the package. Which means that these are individuals who could well benefit from access to lightning rods, if their employer has not been too blinkered by his preconceptions to provide it.

The other thing he realized was that this adjustable toilet idea had real potential, even apart from solving his own particular disabled toilet problem. Why
wasn’t
something like that widely available? This could be his own small contribution to easing the lives of people whose needs were too readily overlooked. He could insist on an adjustable toilet being part of every lightning rod installation; sooner or later, you just
knew
something like that would catch on. Think how much mothers with little kids would appreciate it. In fact, if the whole lightning rod thing didn’t take off, he could just concentrate on developing and marketing his adjustable toilet.

And the third thing he realized was that he now knew why it was that he had never made a career out of sales. All right, he’d had his successes, but something just hadn’t clicked, and now he knew why. Basically, he wasn’t a salesman. He was an ideas man. And those are two very different animals. He just happened to have a talent for thinking up things no one had thought of before, and then persuading people that something they hadn’t happened to have thought of was indispensable. Sales is obviously a
part
of that. A
big
part. But it’s only part of a larger whole. And the thing that made that whole possible was that knack for coming up with ideas.

Having come up with the idea of the adjustable toilet, Joe was able to sell it to Jerry without too much trouble. Jerry said he thought Kansas City was just the place to introduce this novelty to the world. He started singing the Kansas City song from
Oklahoma!
and Joe joined right in, because you should never pass up an opportunity to bond with the client.

The fact that Jerry would sing the song about Kansas City,
Kansas
just showed how uneducated he was, because any idiot knows the Kansas City referred to in
Oklahoma!
is Kansas City, Missouri—the phrase “Kansas City, Mo.” is actually
in
one of the other songs. While the two cities are admittedly contiguous, though on opposite sides of the river, this just makes it all the more annoying for residents of Kansas City, Ka. when people make this kind of mistake. But any salesman knows you can’t afford to get pedantic with the client. The old saying, “The customer is always right,” harks back to this common knowledge. If you’re the kind of person who has to correct someone every time they make a factual mistake, you might just want to stop a moment and compare the average take-home pay of a teacher and that of a halfway competent salesman. Truth be told, you can make a hell of a lot more money by being wrong at the right time than by being right at the wrong time.

Most American kids know this instinctively, which is why they’re so often caught off-base when asked without warning to name the capital of Peru. They know that if it comes to the crunch, and they actually need to know the name of the capital of Peru, they can quickly retrieve the information from the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. But there are more important things in life than impromptu identification of obscure foreign capitals, and when it comes to those things Americans are second to none. When it comes to making somebody feel good who is going to give you hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of business, an American will be shaking hands on the deal while the smart-ass is still waiting for a round of applause because he knew whatever it was without having to look it up.

The main thing was that the adjustable toilet was a done deal. And for that, Joe would have sung just as wholeheartedly in Kansas City, Mars.

The result was the Joe was much busier than he had expected to be just getting Jerry’s outfit up and running. He had to fly out to recruit unifunctional staff, and then he had to fly back to get the prototype toilet installed, and what with one thing and another he wasn’t really able to keep his finger on the pulse at his first installation. He had other things on his mind. Joe gradually got more and more involved in his adjustable toilet project over in the Big K, and by the time the whole installation was in place the cubicle also featured an adjustable sink, an adjustable hand dryer, and an adjustable towel rack, not to mention an adjustable condom and lubricant dispenser and adjustable transporter. The place was so designed that a person of sub-average height would be just as comfortable as anybody else. Joe kept wishing there was some way he could track down Ian and show him what he’d accomplished, since he was probably the only person Joe knew who was capable of appreciating it.

It wasn’t that Joe was spending all his time in the Big K, obviously. He was back and forth. But that was where the focus of his attention was. For some reason, the more he worked on the project, the more aware he became of just how unique it was in terms of the world at large. Every company is required to have conveniences for disabled users, but if somebody happens to be an unusual size the message is “Why didn’t you go before you left home?”

In some ways it was easier to get fired up about something like this than it was about the actual lightning rods. With the lightning rods, in a
sense
you were protecting people from something that was no fault of their own, i.e. a tendency to insult female staff through some kind of testosteronal imbalance. But that does seem to be something people could in
some
sense do something about. Whereas what kind of a world is it that acts like height was something you could change if you had the willpower? It wasn’t even as if you were talking about a
minority
, or something you were expecting to go 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.