An adult stories – The Pleasure Boy 32 by Denker42,Denker42 Dad altered the wording of my memo in a few places, but it went out, much as I had written it, to Woodruffe personnel, and to the general public. In follow-up interviews, he could not avoid discussion of the ground rules of his marriage, as the journalists noted and focused on my mother’s background. They asked him bluntly if he was the submissive in that relationship, and when he told them, “Not when I go to work,” they laughed. Gradually, they worked out that as a lifemate, my mother was indeed the Domme in their marriage, and a cartoon appeared depicting him a Captain of Industry dressed in a maid-servants frillies when he did the housework. He was embarrassed at first, but quickly decided to embrace the image and use it to teach a lesson. For a week he wore a pink apron that said ‘I FEED ALL YOU F_CKERS!’ over his three-piece suit.
Then he had Judith organize a company picnic, at which she worked behind the grill while he and I served the burgers. Dad wore the same apron that he’d been wearing all week. My pink apron, over flesh-coloured tights read ‘THE SECRET OF POWER IS OBEDIENCE TO NATURE.’ Judith’s white apron showed the silhouette of a whip-wielding Dominatrix, with ‘THE NATURE OF THINGS’ as its caption. My Mom just attended in simple, casual country togs and smiled at everyone. The reporters covered the occasion, building their stories around the apparent confidence and exuberance of Woodruffe people. At the cost of some burgers and beverages, they gave us a mountain of wonderful publicity, and their readers stopped laughing.
The positive publicity was fortunate, for my father, and for our project as well, defusing an internal tension which threatened serious damage. The rumours about Judith and her live-in submissive, followed by the press release confirming them, had left the company’s executive committee annoyed that my father had launched his pilot project without seeking their agreement. In the revelation that my father was a submissive in his private life, two VPs saw an opportunity to supplant him as CEO. This was possible now, because the Mars contract, lucrative as it was had left him vulverable.
Needing to raise capital for rapid expansion, he had sold both voting and non-voting shares in Woodruffe Electronics, and no longer held a controlling interest. The corporate VPs, in particular, had received blocks of stock in the company as part of their compensation. It was now theoretically possible to lead an insurrection on the Board of Directors. If ambitious VPs found a sufficient pretext for organizing this movement, it would also be possible in practice. In the revelation that my father was a sexual submissive, controlled (as they saw it) in his domestic life by his geisha wife, two VPs thought they saw a chance of replacing him.
These two, the VPs of Finance and Product Design, convinced the firm’s chief lawyer to go along with them. The VP for software development, herself a submissive, friend and sometime playmate of Judith’s was on our side from the beginning. Five others, the VPs for R&D, Manufacturing, Sensing, Robotics, and AI, were neutral at the outset and thus open to persuasion either way. In the rumour period, the three malcontents started a whispering campaign which they hoped would end – at the next meeting of Woodruffe’s Board of Directors – in a vote of no confidence for my father, and his replacement by Gordon Stuart, the Finance VP, as the new CEO. What with the Mars contract revenue and the public approval of my father, their campaign fizzled, at least for a time. If our program failed or provoked a real scandal, it might revive.
By now, our pilot project had taken shape, and was beginning to bring results: conclusions that we could articulate and agree on in the light of shared experience:
• first, some the customs of my day-to-day relationship with Judith, that we agreed were worth recommending to others;
• next, a final list and specification of our project’s ‘deliverables,’ including issues to be covered in our report to the executives;
• third, the exact purpose, nature and limits of Woodruffe Corporation’s endorsement, support and financial subsidy of lifemate relationships;
• fourth, the administrative requirements and expected costs of Woodruffe’s lifemate program; and
• last, the expected benefits through which the success of the program would be evaluated.
With this list written up and accepted by her and by my father, Judith now had some basis for project management, and for periodic progress reports to the executive committee. She also had certain definite results to show that we were getting something done. At my father’s request, she brought me along to the next meeting of that committee with instructions to be on my most courteous behaviour and to answer all questions however trivial or foolish. Judith told me, “This is where you get to use your escort training. Your job is to make your father look good for launching this pilot, and to make me look good for hiring you.”
In the event, that meeting went very well. Only the Finance guy gave us trouble, raising one objection and difficulty after another, seeking to goad me into losing my temper. Of course, he got nowhere. I had been trained specifically to deal with clowns like that, who take it as a challenge to disrupt a virtuoso performance. There is an art – it forms the basis of geisho escort training – to suffer fools in a way that makes you look mannerly and courteous, while egging them on to look rude and silly before they slink away. I used it on Gordon Stuart, this Finance VP, to good effect: getting him to expose his self-interested heckling for what it was, while being unfailingly polite.
The other VPs thanked me for my presentation and told Judith that they looked forward to reviewing our proposal when it was finished. They told my father that his idea of a Company lifemate program to help with its recruiting and training efforts looked promising, and accepted his apology for launching the pilot project without their approval when he explained that he was only trying to avoid making the stir which that project had ended up making despite our best efforts. They wanted to know who had followed us home from that restaurant, but finally accepted Judith’s decision that an investigation would just cause trouble and that it was better not to know. She told them, “If we knew, we’d have to punish her in some way, which would only provoke bad feelings and trouble.”
Except for Gord Stuart and his two allies, the executive committee now awaited a specific proposal on this matter with an open mind. They would review what we came up with on its merits. It was the best outcome we could have hoped for.
As a pilot project, Woodruffe Corp. had agreed to subsidize Judith’s lifemate relationship for a year. If she and her chosen partner could not design a Woodruffe LifeMate Program (a WooLMP program) in that time, then the idea would be scrapped. We’d had that one-year time frame in mind from the beginning, but Judith knew it would be wise to submit our proposal a few months early, to allow time for discussion and revision before a final yea or nay. She’d taken pains with me to work out good specs for the deliverables I would need to produce. “Whatever format we use,” she had told me, “they must provide a complete conceptual design for the WooLMP, in a readable package which our Executive Committee can debate, revise, approve and fund.”
“Can you spell that out for me, please,” I asked her. “What exactly must that package give them?” What will they use it for, once they’ve read it?”
“I realize that you’ve never worked in this environment before, so I’m not blaming you now. But you need to recognize that any consultant bidding on a design contract like the one we’ve given you needs to know what a conceptual design is (in contrast to the detailed design), and why his client needs it – why they are paying good money to have it produced.”
“If you think of the whole project as building a house for a certain family, then the detailed design is a blueprint that tells construction workers everything they need to know to build the house it specifies. Our Board doesn’t need that yet, and wouldn’t want to spend its time deciphering such a blueprint if we gave it to them. What it needs is what an architect would give some client who wanted a house: a rather vague, or ‘conceptual’ design which the client would use to hire the actual builders and then accept and pay for their work.”
“To produce this ‘conceptual’ design, an architect would meet first with the client and then with the whole family, to discuss their needs and wants. In effect, that’s what we’re doing now. The client may already have chosen and purchased a suitable plot of land. If so, then that terrain will both inspire and constrain the architect’s work. Once the architect has a clear understanding of where the house will be built, and how it will be lived in and used, he’ll start making sketches of what the house will look like, with notes on why he’s made key choices and estimates of what each alternative would cost to build. He’ll discuss the rough sketches with the client and family until there is enough consensus to make finished drawings of this imagined house, from different perspectives. In the end he’ll give those drawings to the family and give them time to discuss what it would be like to live in such a home, and what changes they would want to his design (while it is still cheap to make changes).”
“Then the client would then get back to the architect to request modifications of his original idea. He would oblige them by changing his drawings and estimates to suit their wishes. They might repeat this cycle several times. At last, they would arrive at a finished conceptual design. Included in this final version would be the architect’s best estimate of what the house (still notional at this time) should cost to build – with the specified materials, at their current prices. The architect would send his invoice, the client would pay it, and would then use this finished conceptual design to request bids from several reputable builders on what they would charge him to build the house as specified.”
“In submitting their bids, builders then would need to prepare their own, more detailed designs, with their own cost estimates for materials and labour. The client would review these bids, select a firm that he is willing to trust, and award the construction contract. Some months later, after more or fewer headaches in the construction phase, the family would move in to its new home.”
“So for me, Woodruffe and you are my client, I am the architect and the notional house is the program I’ve been hired to design.”
“Exactly,” Judith said. “And your conceptual design must have three components:
• An adequate discussion of the lifemate relationship as Woodruffe might decide to encourage and support it;
• A description of this WooLMP program in operation including administrative requirements, but also results and benefits and costs as best we can anticipate them;
• A sufficient description of lifemate contracts and the contracting process for Woodruffe’s legal department to give an opinion on the legality of what we have in mind, and go to work preparing the ‘boilerplate’ from which finished contracts prepared for the specific couples who join the program.
She concluded, “If you were a normal consultant – working for me on a normal contract – then those would be your ‘deliverables.’ You’d have to prepare each one and revise it to my satisfaction. Only when I signed off my acceptance would you get paid for the days of work that went into it, according to your original bid. That’s what’s called a ‘fixed price contract.’ We would have written adequate specifications for each deliverable in the document that stimulated you to bid for the contract – called an ‘RFP,’ a Request for Proposal.”
“I never specified deliverables when I hired you – only that you would serve me as required – for one calendar year – we’ll have to agree on them now. So now you’ll write your own specifications and revise them until I agree to them. Go to your desk and write me what you think our executives will need in each of those three areas to approve our proposed program and grant us the funding to do what we’re promising. When you’re finished, show me what you’ve done, and we’ll take it from there.”
I went off, and set to work: to think about each one of these ‘deliverable’ documents that Judith would need to go before the executive committee asking for approval and funding.
Beginning with the LifeMate Relationship, I decided that we’d need to write a manual, which could be handed out to program participants, to explain the lifemate relationships that Woodruffe Corp. hoped to encourage. The executives would not need to see a finished manual, but they would need a good outline, with a completed preface explaining the purpose of the program: This point was crucial, and needed all the prominence we could give it. We were not interested in the lifemates as domestic servants, except as this domestic work competed for time with their professional lives. Each couple would need to resolve the time constraint in its own way. Nor were we interested in kink for its own sake. Each couple would bring their own sexual agendas, their own lovemaps, to their lifemate relationship, and use the freedom of Dominence/submission in their own way. If used wisely, that freedom would enhance their joy and creativity both on the job and in their private lives. As Judith and my father conceived the WooLMP program, the joy it brought would lift morale in the company, radiate to the public and help with our recruiting. As a stimulus to creativity, it would enhance the quality of our designs and thus the reputation of Woodruffe Electronics, and help it meet its contractual obligations to NASA. And help to make a pile of money for its shareholders. Nothing wrong with that. This was what we had to tell the VPs who would consider our proposal. They would accept our program’s costs only if they saw some net gain on the bottom line.
In sum, the lifemate relationships that we wanted to encourage would be primarily a working relationship whose productive and teaching dimensions would be enriched and deepened by the domestic and sexual intimacy of a lifemate partnership. My first deliverable would be the full outline of a manual on such relationships, with a preface explaining the company’s purpose in sponsoring the program.
Speeding right along, from Judith’s metaphor of the architect designing a home for his client’s family, I understood that my second deliverable would have to be a full description of how the program would operate:
• who would be eligible for it,
• what support would be provided to lifemate couples,
• what information (and information systems) would be needed,
• how (and by whom) the program would be administered,
• what results were expected (as a basis for program reporting), and
• what the program would cost.
I saw right away that the WooLMP program, as a Human Resources function, would need to be administered by a new unit in Judith’s department, and that she would almost certainly assign me to run it if I renewed my contract with her. Would I do so? Did I want that future for myself? I would need to think about that. I made a mental note to discuss that question with my mother before the issue came up with Judith.
But for the present purpose, those questions were irrelevant. Admin requirements and program operations would be the same no matter who was in charge. Either as a regular employee or as a new lifemate, the manager of the WooLMP Unit would report to Judith and take orders from her. Did he have to be her lifemate to do this? Except for the optics, no. A regular employee could manage the lifemate unit perfectly well. But Judith’s role as my Domme was already public knowledge. The WooLMP program would look better if its manager were her submissive. The whole thing would look better if I stayed on with her after this year was up. But if I agreed to do so, I would be committing not just to one year-long submissive gig, but to a whole career. I put that question aside for now.
Whatever I decided about my future, my second deliverable would be a full description of WooLMP program operations. At the same time, it would be a report to the executives on the results from the pilot project that they had approved and paid for. It would be that project’s central accomplishment. Even if they finally turned down our proposal, both Judith and my father would want to show that the funding that Mistress had received for my keep had been money well spent.
My third deliverable had a double function: On one hand, it would give the executive committee an opinion from its legal department on the legal implications, especially the potential liabilities of the WooLMP program. To prepare that, I would need to talk with the lawyers and brief them exhaustively on the program – something I had not yet done, and would be in no position to do, until the other deliverables were almost finished.
At the same time, this third component of our conceptual design, would give the lawyers ‘boilerplate’ text that they would use in preparing specific contracts to be signed by particular individuals and couples – as applicants to the WooLMP program and with each other. Or at least, would give them a sufficient basis for their preparation of this ‘boilerplate’ when we came to detailed design and implementation.
This specification of materials to be produced represented about a week of thinking, writing and discussion with Mistress Judith. Once we had a clear idea of the materials that would be needed for our proposal to the executive committee, actually creating those materials was fairly straightforward. Judith and I came to know, from our experience of living, working and playing together, what a healthy relationship of the kind we hoped to encourage should look like. And we became aware of some problems and pitfalls. Writing the skeleton of a lifemate manual, with a preface explaining the corporate purpose of a WooLMP program needed no research at all – only patience and care to ensure that nothing that needed to be said was overlooked.
To identify information requirements for our program, I recruited the help of a business analyst from Woodruffe Company’s informatics shop. Together we prepared on over-all description of the systems, partly computerized but partly clerical, that would be needed for administration and reporting. Judith looked this over and told me how she organize this work unit within her department and what ‘human resources’ it would need. This gave us all we needed to estimate and total up the costs – working from what the company was already paying for comparable managerial, clerical and advisory services.
I postponed my legal task to the end, as it would be a waste of time to approach Woodruffe’s lawyers until we had something definite to show them.
I could not work full time on our proposal. Judith insisted that I continue my studies of Human Resource Management (HRM) and that I give Alan several hours a day of my time time to repay him for his teaching and to gain some practical experience of corporate headhunting. It wasn’t hard to guess her motives. She wanted to see how the two of us got on together and she wanted me to learn his trade. If and when our WooLMP program was approved and funded, I knew she would want to have me working in it or running it. Alan might end up working for me, or I for him. Either way it would be important that the two of us get along, and that I learn what he could teach me.
It took several months of toil over my laptop keyboard, but the proposal came together. Judith confirmed my speculations when she told me to have Alan read it and get his comments. At one point, I asked him what he thought of the program without telling him why I was asking. He assumed that I was wondering whether he’d be interested in taking a lifemate partner or being one.
“To be honest,” he answered. “I’ve come to know you and respect you. I can see you that you enjoy serving Ms. Arruda, but I still don’t see what’s in it for you. You’re a young, handsome well-educated guy. You could have a job as good or better than this one, and a younger, prettier woman without serving her 24/7 and promising to obey her. I can’t see myself as a sub. It’s not who I am.”
“It’s mostly a matter of temperament,” I agreed. “Someday, over a beer, I’ll try to explain why I love submission. What about the other side of it? Can you see yourself taking a lifemate as the Dominant?”
“I don’t know. I do plan on getting married and having a family some day, if I meet the right woman. I’d certainly want a wife who tried to please me. Obedience?? I certainly wouldn’t want to argue with her all the time. But I wouldn’t want the responsibility of running her life for her. I’d want her to do that herself.”
“I can see the logic of this program from the Company’s point of view, but I still have my doubts. I know that there are bright, capable people who will try to boost their careers by taking an apprenticeship of the kind that we can offer. I’m aware that some of them, like yourself, will find the service pleasurable for its own sake. And from the other side, I can see that there are senior people, like Ms. Arruda, who will find it convenient and enjoyable to keep a bright, serviceable apprentice, domestic servant and bed pet who even brings them a little extra income. But I’m not sure the program will help significantly in staffing up for the Mars contract. Ms. Arruda and your father hope it will, but only time will show if they’re right.”
When I reported this conversation to Judith, she chuckled. “Alan doesn’t have enough imagination to be a Dom or a sub. He’s ambitious and he’s a hard worker, but he has a very literal mind. I don’t see him stepping out of his own ego and his own skin in either role. As for his doubts about the program’s effectiveness – he’s right: Only time will tell. I think the program will have significant impact, but that’s partly an educated guess and partly wishful thinking. In what proportions, who knows? We can only try our best, and then sit back to wait and see.”
“You have two weeks now,” Judith said one morning, as I was driving us to work.
“Two weeks for what, Mistress” I asked her.
“Two weeks to get your deliverables wrapped up for presentation to our Executive Committee. We’re just eight months into your one-year contract now. I warned you at the beginning that we had to allow lots of time for debate and possible revisions before your contract runs out.”
“I know that you’re in good shape. The LifeMate Manual only needs some polishing now. The material on contracting likewise. Only the report is holding us up. There’s still a fair bit of work to do on your cost estimates. And then there’s the legal opinion, the recommendations and an executive summary still to write. I know you’ve got good notes for all those parts, but they aren’t written yet.”
“I want to finish up, so here’s what we’ll do: I’ll give the Manual and the sample boilerplate text a last review and edit. I’ll have Alan do a last proofread to fix typos. I want you to see Min Lee in our payroll department and work with her to get your cost estimates reviewed and checked. She has agreed to help, and is expecting you. Unless the cost figures change significantly, write up the recommendations we’ve agreed on and a brief executive summary of the whole package. No more than one page. Bring it all to me when you’re finished. I’ll review those last bits and we’ll push it out the door. I’ll write a covering memo. We’ll need 12 working copies of the whole package for the executive committee, plus the original in our file. Then we’ll sit back and wait for the fur to fly.”
The next two weeks were a scramble for both of us. When I phoned Min Lee, she told me not to stand on ceremony but to just come over and roll up my shirt sleeves. “Your Mistress told me what you need,” she said, “and we’re prepared to work with you. I’m ready to start on it any time you’re ready.”
I went right to her office and introduced myself to a sweet, elderly Chinese woman who had come to Canada as a child, grown up in Vancouver, married a Quebecois in university, and now spoke both this country’s official languages as well as I did. Together we went down the list of positions in the proposed WooLMP administration unit which would be needed to deal with applicants, arrange for their mentoring and manage the program. She found my estimates somewhat out of date (too low) and corrected them. My status in the organization confused her.
“I see Judith is proposing that you be paid $68,000 a year,” Ms. Lee asked me. “How will she justify that? I thought you were her slave.”
“That’s only a way of speaking,” I told her. “I’m her submissive, linked with her by a kind of indenture contract. Actual slavery is illegal here. I obey her. I serve her both at home and at work. If she wants to use me here to manage a unit in her Department, that’s her prerogative and responsibility. Technically, I work for her, but will be employed by the Woodruffe Corporation if the program we’re designing is approved. Then she will collect my salary here – which should be the correct salary for the position I occupy. That will reimburse her expense in keeping me – my room and board, monthly allowance and pension contribution. Other lifemates, if sent to work here, will be paid under the same arrangement. Except in rare, exceptional cases, Woodruffe will not subsidize lifemate couples directly. Legally, lifemate subs will be employed by their Doms and will negotiate and contract with them as I do with Ms. Arruda. They will be kept and paid as agreed between them. If sent to work for others, whether at Woodruffe or anywhere else, their Dom will be paid their salary or wage as agreed between Dom and the outside employer, typically at the going rate for the kind of work they are doing.”
“68 thou a year for me is somewhat less than Ms. Arruda’s other unit managers are making, because I will just be starting out, while they have whatever number of years experience. That’s how we’ve planned it. Does it sound reasonable to you?”
“It sounds good to me, but it’s not my decision.” Ms. Lee replied. “It’s up to the executives who will not approve your program unless they think it’s good for the company.”
“But they may ask your opinion, Ma’am, as I am asking now. If they do, what will you tell them?”
“Whether your program will be worth its administrative costs is not for me to say. They don’t seem excessive. The program may well pay for itself themselves through the creativity it generates and the people it brings in. That seems to be Ms. Arruda’s judgment, and on that subject her opinion is worth more than mine. What I can say is that your compensation plan seems reasonable. You’ll be offering bright young people a chance to jumpstart their careers by apprenticing themselves to a bright star or a senior in their field. I imagine that many talented youngsters will find that a good deal, especially if their sexual tastes run toward BDSM, and if good safeguards are in place to make sure that they are not exploited. What I can say is that from the Company’s point of view, your compensation plan is sound. We won’t be paying anyone more because they’re working for us under a lifemate contract. We won’t be paying them less. For the apprentices, everything will depend on how well they’re treated by their Masters or Mistresses, and on whether they enjoy the submissive role, as you seem to. And as our CEO – your father – does, from what I’ve heard.”
I laughed. “Word gets around doesn’t it?”
“It does. And it’s given me ideas. My husband died two years ago, and I miss him. Some parts of me miss him a lot. And as Woodruffe Company expands, my payroll department is also growing I could use two more warm bodies, and might very well find a place for one such in my bed. If your program is approved, I might become one of your customers.”
“And we’ll be glad to serve you Ma’am – to help you find a partner that meets your needs. You’ve been most kind to me, and helped us a lot.”
I took the elevator up to Judith’s department and reported these findings to her: “Our salary estimates were low, but the correction isn’t terrible. Only about 14% to allow for raises and inflation. Ms. Lee says that our compensation plans seem reasonable to her, but has nothing to say about how well our program will work to stimulate recruiting. She says that’s your department, not hers. She also told me that she might become one of our customers. She estimates that she’ll need two new bodies in Payroll to cope with the new personnel that Woodruffe is taking on for the Mars Project, and could find a use for one of them in her bed. Her husband died two years ago, and she misses him.”
“Very good,” Judith told me. “I knew about her interest in our program from a conversation we had over coffee last week. That’s why I sent you to her. I knew she’d be friendly to us and helpful.”
“Now go correct your numbers, write up our recommendations and that executive summary. Alan and I are almost finished proofreading your other materials. We’ll start editing your report as you hand us finished sections. I want it all in the lap of the Committee by Friday afternoon so they have the weekend to read it.”
As always, I obeyed her wishes precisely. I quickly re-read the finished sections of the report, making a few changes as I did so, and gave them to Judith for her own editing. I altered the numbers in the cost section and passed it to Judith as well. I re-wrote my most recent draft of our recommendations, clinging carefully to the substance of what we’d agreed, but tightening and polishing my sentences to make them read as well as possible. Then I wrote a one-page summary of our proposal and placed a complete draft of our report on Judith’s desk. “There,” I said to her. “It’s done. Ready for your review.”
“Thanks, Jim,” she answered. “I’m going to stay late with Alan and go over what you’ve done. You drive home, and prepare some dinner for us, then eat by yourself and relax. Go to sleep when you want to. Don’t wait up for me. I’ll take a cab home when I’m finished, and leave Alan to finish his proofreading. Tomorrow morning there’ll be a final draft on your desk for you to look over and xerox – twelve copies for the committee, and the original for our file. I’ll sleep in, fend for myself in the morning, then come in, do a covering memo and send you to distribute our product to the other VPs.”
“I’ve already spoken with your father. I asked him if he wanted to review a final draft before it went out to the executive committee. He said no – that since he’d launched our pilot project without consulting the other executives, he didn’t want to take any advantage at the end. He’d receive his copy with the others and would recuse himself from the first discussions until the other VPs had formed a collective opinion and taken a vote. Only then would he step back in and maybe over-rule them or try to change their minds ‘if he strongly disagreed with their judgment.’ His exact wortds.”
“So it’s up to us now – to me, really – since you won’t be participating in the committee’s discussions, except for the presentation they’ll probably want. So you should rest and recharge your batteries. You’ve done a fine job, and I’m very pleased with you. If they approve our program, you’re going to be very busy helping me launch it.”
The report went out on a Friday, as Judith had planned. Early next week nothing happened, as the VPs took their time to read it and form their opinions. On the Monday, Judith told me to start working on a formal presentation of our proposal. “No hurry yet,” she said, you’ll have a few days to prepare. But I want you to plan it – with a preliminary list of the slides you’ll need – and come discuss it with me.”
On Wednesday afternoon, when I showed her my outline, she made a few suggestions, told me that Alan was available to help me prepare the slides, and then announced that the executive committee would meet in a week, the following Wednesday, to hear my presentation. “Be prepared for hostile questions,” she said. “Remember Gordon Stuart, that VP of finance who gave you a hard time six months ago, when we introduced our pilot project to them? He’s still no friend of ours, so expect him to try again. Handle him just the way you did last time.
I did; and apart from him, the presentation went smoothly. I had given talks before as a grad student, and so was out of practice for public presentations, but not completely green. I explained what the Corporation would offer by way of support to its employees and how it would present the program to the public and to job applicants. I described the benefits that we expected – in recruitment, in training, in creativity and in morale. I outlined what would be needed for delivery of the program, the requirement for a new Human Relations unit and the expected cost. I talked about anticipated public response, which we thought would be mostly favourable, based on our experience when our pilot project made news.
I can’t tell you much about the debate that followed my talk because I wasn’t around for it, and Judith refused to tell me. Always, when she came home or back to her office after one of those committee meetings, all she would tell me when I asked her what happened was that their discussions were confidential. “By unanimous agreement, we don’t talk about executive disagreements except among ourselves,” she said. “Once a decision is made, we announce it as the decision of the whole committee – which, in fact, it is. How we came to that decision – who was for it originally, and who against – is not a public concern. Once the decision is made, we all do our best to carry it out. That’s the idea anyway.”
Though I wasn’t around for any of the debate or politicking that followed my presentation, I saw just enough to know that the plot to displace my father continued below the surface, and that the final decision could not have been unanimous. They called me back once to answer questions for the whole group and I was summoned several times to answer questions privately. From that questioning, I knew who was definitely against my father and our proposal, but had no way of knowing how the seemingly neutral VPs would vote when the time came.
Until they voted, in connection with the proposal there was nothing more to do. I settled down to studying human resources management again and to helping my tutor Alan with his recruitment work. Judith kept her own counsel, merely telling me “Its out of our hands now. We’ve done our part. All we can do is wait.”
And so we did, for about six weeks. Judith did inform me that a few alterations had been agreed. At least to start with, they had cut our funding for training and mentoring, on the grounds that we could always ask for more money later, if more was needed. Also, they had voted themselves some income for their ‘executive wives,’ who worked for the corporation without a salary by participating in their husband’s social life, and by homemaking for him at a certain social level. Judith refrained (she told me) from asking for some extra income for me, to compensate for my domestic services.
Time passed. I studied HRM and kept busy with business as usual. One afternoon, I was sitting at my desk drafting a want ad for software engineers with AI experience, when Judith called me into her office with happy excitement in her voice. “I just got a phone call from your father,” she told me. “The committee just approved our proposal. The program is a go. I hadn’t known because they exiled me when they voted on it – not wanting me to know who was for it, and who against. We have a budget, and my department has authorization to launch the program and run it.”
“For you, that means your job as architect of the WooLMP is finished. Your plans have been accepted. What I need now is a manager to put them into practice. Would you care to apply?”
“Let me ask you a question first, Mistress.” She scowled at me but did not interrupt. “Do you intend to keep me on as your lifemate? Do you want to renew our contract?”
“Obviously yes, idiot. I wouldn’t be offering you the job if I didn’t.”