feel like talking. There are times when all you want is something that will take your mind off things. If it hadn’t been for the disability the whole Louise thing would probably have really gotten in the way of work. Instead he was able to just put it behind him and concentrate on achieving his goals.
Others, of course, had stories of their own. Something that had looked completely uncomplicated, a purely physical convenience, turned out to have far-reaching psycho-social repercussions.
Whether Joe could have circumvented these problems if he had done a follow-up study on the Spin the Bottle participants will never be known. Long after the lightning rods had become a standard fixture in a wide variety of corporate environments somebody got the idea of going back to talk to the people who had taken part in the Spin the Bottle trial; to his surprise he found that the Spin the Bottle installation was still in place ten years after Joe signed off on the project. A couple of members of staff who were more computer savvy than Joe had doctored the software to introduce a couple of new twists, but essentially the proto-lightning rod was still going strong, with no noticeable negatives that anyone could see. Nobody had to do it who didn’t want to. Most people thought it was fun.
Nobody had made a connection between the application and the lightning rods they had heard or read about in the media. When the researcher pointed out that their device had been developed by the same guy, who had gone on to develop the more hard-core service immediately after, people were taken aback and disgusted; they all agreed that something like that would have poisoned the office atmosphere. What they had was just something for fun, something to lighten up the day. They certainly were not going to upgrade.
So even if Joe had taken a more responsible attitude toward checking for fallout, it’s possible that the net result would have been just the same.
As for the lightning rods, relatively few aspects of their experience could in any case have been satisfactorily modeled through extrapolation from the earlier Spin the Bottle trial.
LET THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY
Lucille had always thought of herself as pretty unflappable. The way she saw it was, she was the kind of person who could take things in her stride. She didn’t let things get to her. Whatever might be going on around her, she just got on with whatever it was she had to do. Also, she prided herself on her attention to detail. More specifically, she prided herself on paying attention to detail without getting obsessed about it. Basically she was the kind of person who could just get on with the job without making a fuss about it. Give her something to do and she would get the job done.
When she had started working she had taken all these things for granted. You’re there to do a job. So see what needs to be done, and do it. Can’t get much more obvious than that, right? Wrong.
What she had started realizing after a while was that most people just flew apart over things that she just took in her stride. The longer you work, the more you realize how many people can’t deal with things. Even if they’re paid to deal with them, they still can’t deal with them. So that somebody who just does what they’re paid to do really stands out.
Well, that’s fine. And it wasn’t that people had been unappreciative. People were always saying how much they appreciated working with someone they could trust to do the job right. They were always saying how great it was to work with someone who didn’t lose her head in a crisis. She’d worked in quite a few places, and each time word would get around and she’d be asked to help out by people she didn’t normally work for when something big came up, because if it was really big they wanted someone with an attention to detail who didn’t lose her head in a crisis. Fine .
It wasn’t exactly that the pay was bad, either. Her salary usually
Others, of course, had stories of their own. Something that had looked completely uncomplicated, a purely physical convenience, turned out to have far-reaching psycho-social repercussions.
Whether Joe could have circumvented these problems if he had done a follow-up study on the Spin the Bottle participants will never be known. Long after the lightning rods had become a standard fixture in a wide variety of corporate environments somebody got the idea of going back to talk to the people who had taken part in the Spin the Bottle trial; to his surprise he found that the Spin the Bottle installation was still in place ten years after Joe signed off on the project. A couple of members of staff who were more computer savvy than Joe had doctored the software to introduce a couple of new twists, but essentially the proto-lightning rod was still going strong, with no noticeable negatives that anyone could see. Nobody had to do it who didn’t want to. Most people thought it was fun.
Nobody had made a connection between the application and the lightning rods they had heard or read about in the media. When the researcher pointed out that their device had been developed by the same guy, who had gone on to develop the more hard-core service immediately after, people were taken aback and disgusted; they all agreed that something like that would have poisoned the office atmosphere. What they had was just something for fun, something to lighten up the day. They certainly were not going to upgrade.
So even if Joe had taken a more responsible attitude toward checking for fallout, it’s possible that the net result would have been just the same.
As for the lightning rods, relatively few aspects of their experience could in any case have been satisfactorily modeled through extrapolation from the earlier Spin the Bottle trial.
LET THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY
Lucille had always thought of herself as pretty unflappable. The way she saw it was, she was the kind of person who could take things in her stride. She didn’t let things get to her. Whatever might be going on around her, she just got on with whatever it was she had to do. Also, she prided herself on her attention to detail. More specifically, she prided herself on paying attention to detail without getting obsessed about it. Basically she was the kind of person who could just get on with the job without making a fuss about it. Give her something to do and she would get the job done.
When she had started working she had taken all these things for granted. You’re there to do a job. So see what needs to be done, and do it. Can’t get much more obvious than that, right? Wrong.
What she had started realizing after a while was that most people just flew apart over things that she just took in her stride. The longer you work, the more you realize how many people can’t deal with things. Even if they’re paid to deal with them, they still can’t deal with them. So that somebody who just does what they’re paid to do really stands out.
Well, that’s fine. And it wasn’t that people had been unappreciative. People were always saying how much they appreciated working with someone they could trust to do the job right. They were always saying how great it was to work with someone who didn’t lose her head in a crisis. She’d worked in quite a few places, and each time word would get around and she’d be asked to help out by people she didn’t normally work for when something big came up, because if it was really big they wanted someone with an attention to detail who didn’t lose her head in a crisis. Fine .
It wasn’t exactly that the pay was bad, either. Her salary usually
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