by
Helen DeWitt
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The funny thing about it was that at the time he felt really guilty about it. He kept thinking he should get up and go out and sell vacuum cleaners. He should get up and go out and make something of his life. It felt like he was just lying there wasting time. He kept doing it but he didn’t feel good about it. He was thirty-three years old and he had zip to show for it. And here he was lying in bed in the middle of the day not even masturbating effectively but just twiddling until he got the fantasy set up to his satisfaction. He didn’t feel good about it at all.
His feeling at the time was that the guy who had cleaned up after Hurricane Edna had probably been a completely different kind of guy. The kind of guy who goes out, buys a magazine, takes the magazine home, opens the magazine, looks at the tits of the month, jerks off, closes the magazine, and goes out and sells vacuum cleaners.
Joe lay with his head on his arm. His hand, he realized, was holding a limp, wilted dick. Jesus, he thought. Jesus. This was exactly the problem. What was it with him? He was the type of guy to go out and try to sell vacuum cleaners and end up eating twenty fucking pieces of pumpkin fucking pie. Jesus.
There are guys who can persuade someone they want a new vacuum cleaner even if they have only just bought one. There are guys who can persuade someone they want a new vacuum cleaner even if the vacuum cleaner they have now is more a member of the family than an appliance. In all probability half the people who bought an Electrolux after Hurricane Edna had a perfectly good vacuum cleaner that had come through the hurricane miraculously unscathed. The reason they had bought a new vacuum cleaner was that they had come up against a guy who was born to sell vacuum cleaners. The reason they did not want to buy another vacuum cleaner now was that they were dealing with a guy who did not have what it takes to sell vacuum cleaners.
What he thought was: I don’t know if I have what it takes or not. I’ve never really been tested. I’ve never had the chance to find out what I’m capable of. But I know one thing. It’s one thing to try, and do your best, and fail. All you can ever do is give something your best shot, and sometimes that’s just not enough. But it’s another thing to not even try. This is the first time I’ve had a chance at something really big. If I just walk away from it, what does that make me?
“Look, Joe,” he said. “Let’s not get too serious here. I’m not saying it won’t be a lot of work. But it should be a lot of fun, too. Are you having such a good time selling vacuum cleaners? And OK, you may get some funny looks. But just try to see the humor in it. Besides, at the end of the day, you’re doing everybody a favor. That’s something to feel good about. So just do the best you can, and remember, if it all goes horribly wrong, you can always shoot yourself.”
unironically good self-talk
One of the mistakes that Joe made in the beginning was to assume that the biggest problem would be finding women who would be willing to do the job. The way he looked at it was that there were all kinds of reasons why anyone who had the skills to do straight office work would not want to branch out, no matter how big the pay-off. Whereas finding companies to install the facility would, he assumed, be relatively straightforward. Everybody knew sexual harassment was a major problem; everybody knew that issuing directives and guidelines that stayed, like as not, in the bottom of people’s In tray was not the answer to that problem. Especially since the results-orientated type of guy who tended to transgress the boundaries was the least likely to waste time reading memos on sexual harassment. In fact, if somebody has time to spend reading that kind of garbage that’s probably not an individual you want on your workforce in the first place. If cuts have to be made, that individual is going to be one of the first to go, thus further eroding the number of people in the workplace who have familiarized themselves with the sexual harassment policy.
Joe had once failed to sell a single set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in six months. He had once sold a single Electrolux and eaten 126 pieces of homemade pie in a time frame where most salesmen would hope to reverse the ratio of vacuum cleaners to pie. And now, after at first not succeeding, he had tried, tried, tried again and he had placed an innovative system of proactive sexual harassment management on a six-month trial basis.
Besides, the thing to remember is there are two ways of looking at things you don’t like that life throws at you. One way is to emphasize the negative and just fall apart because every little thing isn’t exactly the way you like it. The other way is to look at it as an opportunity to practice dealing with things you don’t like. It’s a chance to practice not letting things get to you. You start out on little annoyances like the bus being late or running out of coffee when you don’t have time to go to the store, and you get to the point where you just don’t notice. Then you work up to slightly bigger annoyances, like just missing a bus when there won’t be another for an hour. You get to the point where you just take that in your stride. And each time something goes wrong you practice just dealing with the situation without getting worked up about it. If something comes along that you really don’t like, this is a chance to see how strong you are. If you can get through something potentially unpleasant without letting it interfere with your peace of mind, that tells you something about yourself. No matter what happens, nothing is going to drag you down. That’s an incredibly strong position to be in. You don’t get to that position by shrinking from a little unpleasantness.
She spent quite a lot of time thinking about which particular project would give her a real sense of achievement. What she finally decided was that this was the ideal opportunity to read Proust’s masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu, in French. The amount of time lightning rods were typically expected to be on duty would be just right for working through a French text. On the one hand she wouldn’t be reading a lot at any one time, so she wouldn’t get discouraged. On the other hand, it was quite a long book, so by the time she finished she’d probably have enough money for Harvard Law School. She could look at the volumes on her shelf and see how far she had to go.
So she went to the university bookstore and bought the complete set, and she started at page one, paragraph one on her first day on the job.
Sure enough, the idea worked perfectly. The fact that she had to struggle with the French meant she didn’t have a lot of attention to spare for anything else that might be going on. She’d go through as much text as she could, underlining words she didn’t know with a pencil. At night she’d look up the words and read through the passage again. The next day she’d read on. Within a month she was having to look up fewer words. Within six months she was reading the French almost as well as she read English—and that was entirely the result of doing it on a daily basis.
So unlike most lightning rods she was able to look at something she’d actually accomplished with the time. It was no different from reading a book while you have a massage, or a jacuzzi, except that she’d done it on a daily basis for six months. Instead of cluttering up her mind with bad feelings, she had actually improved her mind. And by the time she reached the end of A la recherche du temps perdu she’d have earned $100,000 just out of time spent reading Proust.
Pas mal.
amazing