The Pleasure Boy 32

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.