Free Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt

a thousand had all been for nothing, because all eighteen had answered ads for permanent jobs. In retrospect, that had been a mistake. Granted. But there’s no point kicking a dead horse.
    So he picked himself up and started recruiting again, and within a week he had five gals prepared to try it out on a six-month contract, plus another five for camouflage. He wrote a new software program for the occasion. And he prepared himself for the last hurdle: a series of motivational talks with the individuals whom the package was designed to benefit.
    Joe knew he would have to talk to the first beneficiaries of the program himself. He was going to have to talk to them one at a time, and he was going to have to choose his words carefully. One thing was for sure, if he explained it to a group it would never get off the ground. Everybody would be looking at everybody else to see how they were reacting, and it would be touch and go.
    What he did was he arranged a day of brief appointments with the men in question. He explained about the dangers of inadvertently committing sexual harassment in the modern office. He explained that research had shown that the highest-performing individuals in a company were often the very ones who were put at risk. He commented that the thing about drive is you either have it or you don’t, and if you have it you can’t just turn it off at the flick of a switch. He explained that in view of these findings the company was placing a facility at the disposal of its highest-ranking performers, on an experimental basis.
    Participants would be offered the opportunity anywhere from two to five times a week at randomly generated times of finding release for any pent-up physical needs. A notification would appear on a participant’s computer screen. It would be entirely up to the participants whether they took action or not. Administrators of the program would have no information as to uptake on the part of individuals. Participation or non-participation would be entirely confidential.
    As Joe spoke on, the client would, typically, not say anything at first in case it turned out to be a joke. So Joe would flesh out the rationale of the program with material on the baboon in captivity, amplifying if necessary with other findings in primatology. He would point out that the ventro-ventral, or so-called “missionary,” position was virtually unheard of among other primates; that the ventro-dorsal position, or mounting from behind, was the preferred method of entry among virtually every primate known to man; and that we ignore nature at our peril.
    While the client digested this unfamiliar material, Joe would continue to outline the logistics. A participant who had received notification, he explained, would be entitled to make use of the facility at his own convenience at any time before the end of the working day, at which time, unfortunately, the entitlement would no longer be valid. Should the participant choose to avail himself of the opportunity, he could either accept immediately or select the LATER option on the menu, in which case he would be allowed to either specify a later time, or simply wait until a convenient moment occurred and then click on the I’M READY NOW icon.
    Any form of acceptance, Joe would explain, would activate a notification for a lightning rod; if the time was convenient she would report for duty, if it was inconvenient she would return the assignment to the pool for someone else to pick up. The identity of the lightning rods would remain confidential at all times.
    Someone like Bill Gates could probably do this amount of programming standing on his head, but for Joe it represented a real challenge. He would have appreciated some sign that his clients were impressed by the sophistication of the product. For the most part, though, they seemed to focus on other things.
    In fact he knew from the first moment he set eyes on them that the guys were a bunch of assholes. They all reacted in