The Search For The Perfect Lube

Tim Morris' laptop bleeped so he clicked on the blinking email icon. He swore under his breath when he saw the subject line. Malcomb had called a meeting for four. Tim swore again when he looked at the time on his watch. It was ten 'til four, and the executive conference room was three floors up. He'd have to almost run in order to comply with Malcomb's edict that all meetings start on time. In order to start his meetings on time, Malcomb expected all attendees to be there at least three minutes before the starting time, and five was even better.

Tim was the Director of Product Quality for Frobisher's Personal Products, a company that made over-the-counter products for, as Malcomb put it, "Probably the most uncomfortable of all mankind's illnesses". That illness was constipation, and FPP made rectal suppositories that were guaranteed to fix the condition or your money back. They also made a line of hot water bottles that included a hose, two little nozzles for enema use and one long, curved one called a "feminine hygiene attachment". Everybody except Malcomb called that one the "V-flush".

Tim liked his job except for having to work for Malcomb. Malcomb Frobisher was one of those executives who believed the CEO of any company should have a complete understanding of every aspect of running his business. Since Malcomb was the CEO of FPP, he saw no reason why any of his employees should question his competency in every area of the business. Had Malcomb been as competent as he believed himself to be, working for him might have been more like fun.

Working for Malcomb was like trying to build a house in the middle of a hurricane. Malcomb always wanted the "latest info", and once he got the report, had a multitude of ways to make the situation better if only his employees were smart enough to figure out those ways and put them into use. He expected each and every one of his ideas to be analyzed, planned, and financially evaluated by each department and that information presented at the next staff meeting a week later.

Since Malcomb considered every one of his ideas as a possible candidate for a patent, they were therefore treated as secret. That meant only employees at the director level could do any of the analyzing and planning. Tim and the rest of the Directors at FPP spent most of their time putting together presentations that called Malcomb's ideas really great ideas, but because of the state of technology, weren't financially feasible. That wouldn't have been all that bad if they hadn't had real jobs to do as well.

Tim unplugged his laptop and tucked it under his arm, stuck a pen in his breast pocket, and headed for the elevator. He made it to the meeting within the three minutes limit.

"Boys", began Malcomb -- he always called them "his boys" -"I've just had a report from Accounting on our sales this quarter. I'm sorry to say that FPP is still on a downward sales trend for all our products. I know it's not the fault of any single one of you, but together we have to take the blame. We also have to take on the task of finding out how to dig ourselves out of this hole we seem to be falling into.

"That's what my great-great-grandfather did in eighteen seventy, and he's responsible for the company we have today. As I've probably told you before, he was a patent medicine salesman and he had the same problem we face today. He didn't give up, he...

Oh my god, thought Tim, here he goes again with the story of how FPP came to make suppositories. He'd heard it so often he could almost repeat it verbatim.

Hiram Frobisher was an English immigrant who found his calling making and selling what passed for medicine in those days. Alcohol was always the base, as the harsh taste made the medicine seem very strong. Hiram added selected herbs for color, odor, and taste, and bottled them himself. He did his mixing and bottling on Sunday. The other days of the week, he traveled the surrounding area with a horse and wagon, and sold his medicine to anyone with a quarter for one of his small bottles, or half a dollar for one of the large ones.

Hiram bought his alcohol from a local farmer who distilled it from corn mash. One day in July of eighteen seventy, the farmer's still caught fire along with a hundred gallons of fresh moonshine. Hiram was out of business unless he could quickly find another source. He tried and tried, but couldn't.

Hiram was sitting on his porch watching his wife make soap the next week since he didn't have anything to sell, and noticed the clear liquid left over after she ladled out the soap. "Bertha, what do you do with that? he asked.

"I throw most of it away, but I keep a couple of bottles to use on my hands when they get dry."

Well, old Hiram didn't believe in throwing away anything he could sell, so he set about finding a way to use the liquid. It was slippery, and it was clear. He tasted it and found it to be a little on the sweet side. He didn't think people would buy medicine that tasted good, so he discarded that idea.

It was the next day that Hiram went outside to the privy but got no results. The same thing happened the next day, and Hiram was not feeling well.

If I only had some way speed things up, I'd feel a lot better, he thought. Then he remembered the slippery stuff from Bertha's soap making he'd been working on.

Bertha didn't like the idea of sticking a funnel in Hiram's ass while he was bent over a kitchen chair, but he convinced her he needed her help. Once the funnel was in place, Hiram had her pour in a cup full of the slippery stuff and then take the funnel out. He put his pants back on and waited.

Nothing had changed by dinner time, so Hiram ate his normal meal. Nothing had happened by bedtime either, so Hiram went to bed.

About three in the morning, something did change. Hiram woke up with a strange gurgling feeling in his lower belly and an urgent need to visit the privy again. He made it out the kitchen door before the thin stream of evil-smelling, brown liquid erupted from his ass. Hiram tried to contain it, but it was like trying to stop a river from flowing. A smelly trail of brown ooze marked his path to the privy, and Hiram spent half an hour in there before deciding the surge was over. It took seven corn cobs to get himself cleaned up and he had to take off his long underwear and walk to the house naked, but Hiram was ecstatic. He'd discovered a miracle cure.

The rest, as they say, is history. Hiram figured out how to mix the liquid with gelatin and form it into bullet shapes that were easier use than Bertha's funnel, and after a few trials, he figured out the appropriate amount and size to give a somewhat more gentle relief. In a month, he was out peddling "Frobisher's Blockage Relief" and making a small fortune in the process. By the time Malcomb inherited the company, Frobisher had a virtual monopoly on the suppository market.

Hiram's voice brought Tim back to the meeting.

" -- and I know we can do just as well if we put our minds to it."

"Jack, you get your marketing people to finding out what's happening in the market and what we can do about it. Rick, I want to talk to you about some production improvements we can make to lower costs. No sense in losing more money than we have to."

When Tim arrived for the regularly scheduled staff meeting the next Wednesday, Jack, the marketing director, had already set up his laptop and connected it to the projection TV mounted in the ceiling. He took his seat just as Malcomb walked in the door.

Malcomb counted heads, and satisfied all his directors were there, he began the meeting.

"I want to congratulate Jack for putting together this presentation so quickly. I myself haven't seen it yet, but Jack tells me they've finished their market research and have a proposal. Jack, let's see what you've come up with."

Jack smiled and ran his hand over his freshly trimmed and styled hair. He had a habit of doing that - getting his hair cut just before any meeting involving Malcomb. Tim had known for a long time that Jack was an asshole, and figured the haircuts were another one of his ways to suck up to Malcomb.

"Well, yes, I...we finished a quick evaluation of the market. This graph", he tapped a key on his laptop, "will show you what our sales are doing."

The graph was of Sales Dollars over the past twenty years.

"As you can see, sales have been dropping for quite a while. I...we were able to correlate the decline in suppository sales to the advent and increase of this."

Jack tapped his keyboard again and a green line appeared on the same graph.

"The green line is my...our estimate of sales for fiber substitutes and the sales of high fiber food products as reported by the USDA."

Jack turned to face the table.

"Simply put, gentlemen, people aren't getting constipated as much as they used to because they're taking fiber substitutes and eating lots of broccoli. We can't hope to stop that behavior. If we project the graph even further, like this", he tapped his laptop again, "our sales will dwindle to almost nothing within five years. Are there any questions."

Malcomb cleared his throat.

"Jack, you're telling me our sales are down because people don't need our product?"

"Yes, sir. Oh, there will always be some of the baby boomers who grew up with suppositories who'll keep using them, but the generations after that are into eating healthy."

Malcomb sighed.

"That's a sad commentary on what America has become. We used to be a steak and potatoes nation. Now we're tofu and broccoli. I wonder what we'll be in another twenty years. So what do we do?"

Jack smiled again.

"My...our market research encompassed only products that don't require FDA approval because that's a very time consuming and expensive process. I...we also looked at what costs people would pay for a product that might not be a necessity, but would be a true convenience. I...we filtered that research with our own development and manufacturing capabilities.

"After all the data was in and analyzed, the recommendation was this."

Jack pressed his keyboard, and a picture of a man and woman in bed popped up on the screen. The woman wore a lace nightgown and had a helpless look on her face. The man had on striped pajamas and it was easy to see he was upset by the frown on his face.

Malcomb coughed.

"I don't see any product there."

"No, Malcomb, you don't because there aren't many on the market, at least ones most people would buy. What this couple needs is this."

The picture changed to the same man and woman in the same bed. She seemed to be naked, though the bed sheet was pulled up over her breasts. She was resting on the man's bare chest and both had very satisfied looks on their faces. After a few seconds, the picture zoomed in on the table beside the bed and a bottle that said "Frobisher's Easy Go".

Jack continued.

"In the picture before, the couple didn't look very happy did they? No, they didn't because of a fact of nature. As women age, as is the baby boomer generation, they tend to, shall we say, lose the ability to uh...they're a bit too dry for intimacy, sometimes. Generations before just accepted that for the most part. The baby boomers and the generations that followed don't.

"They want something natural feeling with no taste or odor. The problem they have is other than something you might buy in a gas station men's room, there isn't much out there, and there's nothing at your local discount store. Oh, there is a type of jelly doctors use for rectal examinations, but it doesn't feel right, at least according to our survey participants."

Malcom's eyebrows raised.

"You took a survey?"

"Yes, sir. I...we took a survey of our employees. As you know, about half are in the generation with the issue. We didn't get back a lot of responses, but those that did return theirs didn't like the jelly at all. The same result happened with various other substances we asked about."

"Ok, I get that. What I don't get is why the taste matters?"

Tim had to stifle the chuckle. Warren, the Chem Lab director, didn't quite get his in time, but he covered it pretty well. The chortle quickly became a coughing fit Warren appeared to quell with a drink of water.

"Uh...well", said Jack, "there are some men, and I would suppose some women too, who'd rather taste what nature made than something from a factory."

Malcomb sputtered.

"See what's becoming of this country. Now you tell me people are...are...it's just perverted, that's what it is."

Jack smiled again, but his tone was a little sterner.

"You may think that, Malcomb, but there's a huge market out there. Women in particular want this. If we don't service those women, so to speak, someone else will. We need to get working on our lubes as soon as possible."

Malcomb looked up.

"Lubes...as in more than one?"

"Yes", said Jack. One that's as close to Nature's own as we can make it and one that's a lot thicker and more slippery. My...our research suggests a significant number of our future customer base enjoy the uh...the road less traveled for their pleasure. That's confirmed, by the way, by the slow, but steady growth of our enema kits. It seems as if _"

Malcomb held up his hand and shook his head.

"I don't need to hear that. I had no idea, but I believe you. Warren, get your lab working on it tomorrow if not today. Jack, I don't want Frobisher's name on the bottle. Call it something else. Work with Legal to set up a subsidiary or something. Tim, I'll need you to work with Warren on test methods and evaluation. The rest of you, help out where you can.

And so, in a conference room on the fourth floor, the future of Frobisher Personal Products was steered on a different course.

Tim spoke to Warren after the meeting about what he could do to help. Warren was worried.

"Tim, I can figure out what's in it easy enough if I can get a representative sample, but how the hell am I supposed to do that?"

Tim chuckled.

"Well, you're married, aren't you?"

He shook his head.

"Uh-uh, I'm not asking Shelly if I can stick a test tube in there and collect some. It'd be the last thing I get to put in there for a month, at least. Would you have asked your ex, Judy, to let you do that? Besides, she's just one woman. It's been a long time, but if I remember right all women don't feel the same. I mean, they're all kind of slippery, but some more than others. I need more than one sample, like a hundred or so."

Tim scratched his head.

"I don't know, but we can at least decide what characteristics we need to evaluate.

The start of the list was easy for them, because Jack had already stated the main goals.

1. Chemical makeup as close to natural as possible

2. No taste

3. No odor

After those three, Warren looked at Tim.

"What else is there? I really never thought about it before. It was just there."

"Same here", said Tim. "Maybe we need an expert to tell us more about it."

Warren shook his head again.

"You know how Malcomb is about secrecy. He'd never agree to letting a doctor come in on the project."

Tim thought for a minute.

"Maybe we don't need a doctor. Maybe we just need somebody who knows a lot about it."

"OK, but where do we find somebody who does that Malcomb would approve of?"

"Who would know more than a woman? I mean, they're the ones who have it in the first place."

Warren nodded.

"OK, but how do we get some to talk to us. I'm not going to stand on the street corner and ask every woman who walks by if she'll tell us about something like that. I'd either get slapped silly or get arrested."

"No, I wasn't thinking of anything like that. Remember when we had the complaints about the V-flush and redesigned it? We asked our female employees for their opinions. It worked then. It oughta work now."

"I don't know. The V-flush was something women use, not something they make. I mean, it was one thing for them to say the V-flush needed less curve and how long it should be. It's quite another for a woman to describe what her...how her...damn, I don't even know how to ask that question."

"I wasn't thinking we'd interview them individually. I was thinking we'd give them a sheet of questions they could answer without giving their name.

Warren scratched his head.

"So, what's that going to tell us? You going to ask them how it smells and feels? I can't analyze that. I need samples."

Tim frowned. What Warren said was true, but they couldn't just ask their employees for samples...well, maybe they could if they handled it right.

"Warren, what if we asked for volunteers for a special study, but we didn't tell them what it was about until they volunteered? We'd print up an explanation they could read, and the ones who wanted to help could say yes or no then. The ones who didn't could just go away."

"But Malcomb's secrecy thing. We'd have to make all of them swear to keep quiet. The only way to do that would be to threaten to fire them if they said anything. Think HR would go for that?"

"I think so. We did a similar thing with the hot water bottles when they were being designed to double as enema kits. We told all the people it was a company secret and they shouldn't say anything or our competition would steal our ideas and make the same thing. We didn't exactly say we'd fire them if they talked, but we let them know talking about the new design would jeopardize their jobs."

Warren stroked his chin.

"OK, we'll get a few I imagine, but how do we get our samples? I'm not going to play doctor and go dipping into the well, so to speak."

Tim thought for a minute and then smiled.

"We'll have them collect the samples. How much do you need?"

"The more the better, but I could work with just a drop or two."

"How about on a Q-Tip?"

Warren shook his head.

"No, it would be better with just the stuff. I could work with a Q-Tip, but it'll take longer, and it might change the chemistry."

"So, what could we use?"

Warren thought for a moment, then snapped his fingers and reached into the side drawer of his desk.

"They make these little ceramic spoons for mixing chemicals. The flat blade on one end is for stirring and the little spoon on the other is for dipping the chemicals out of the bottle. They could use the spoon end. They're pretty small, but I should get enough to analyze if they can fill it up once. We'll give them a test tube with a stopper, too. Once they've taken the sample, they'll put the spoon and everything in the test tube and put in the stopper so it doesn't get contaminated by something."

The notice went up on the bulletin boards the next afternoon.

FEMALE ASSOCIATES -- WE NEED YOUR HELP

Frobisher's Personal Products is developing a new product for women and we need your help to make this new product a success. You can be part of the team that develops the future of FPP and what we make for years to come. Please come to the Product Quality Manager's office to find out more and to join our team.

For a couple of days, no women came to Tim's office, but the rumors on the shop floor were running rampant.

"I heard it was some sort of body lotion that makes your skin really soft."

"It's a shampoo that colors while you wash your hair."

"It's a sex toy, I just know it. Jimmy said he'd heard that from one of the guys in Engineering."

"It's a suppository for yeast infections. You just stick it up there, it melts, and kills the yeast. That's what our machines make isn't it -- suppositories?"

Tim heard these rumors and some even more far-fetched and was pleased. At least the secret hadn't leaked out yet.

He was getting ready to leave for lunch that Thursday when a woman knocked on his door. He said "Come on in. What can I do for you?"

Her name was Kimberly, and her tight knit top and tight jeans told Tim she knew she looked great and wanted to show what she had.