Chapter Eight
Sales performance of Clarity in Cayman as a door to door Herbaline saleswoman was dismal, she took in less than ten percent of sales reported by other employees of Herbaline sampled, sales persons working out of Cayman and California, a total of one hundred and seventy people, excluding Lanai, who had done moderately poorly, at a bashful fifteen percent of sales, of the next poorest employee of Herbaline on the sample list after Clarity. Lanai was left in her room, and Clarity was told to show up at Coley's office.
"It's not a good performance, Clarity," said Coley.
"Door to door is not for me," said Clarity.
"Clarity, you are reacting to your performance, without really thinking. It's not you, really."
Manglove showed Clarity a plastified chart labeled 'emotion scale'.
"You have hit the reactive point on the scale, the point labeled six in the emotion scale labeling the emotional range of people between the number one and the number ten, where one is rational and anything above five is emotional."
Clarity looked at the title of the chart. It said scale, the word scale implied measuring, and Coley was measuring her emotion. The chart of emotions to help out employees working at Herbaline was not as such. There was a lie sold as truth at the company, the chart of emotions was not there to provide sales assistance to employees. Instead, it measured people's emotional profile with a number, labeling them emotional, as a result of just venting out in open disagreement.
"So this is a scale that ranges between the areas of one and ten," said Clarity.
"Yes. Your interest makes me think I'm going to put you to work outside the sales group. If you work on this chart, you'll have to bring out the 90 areas that will make this chart a genuine useful diagram, that can be used by the professional employee today, at Herbaline and other places, breaking up each unit in the scale into ten emotion units, smaller, amounting to ten units for each of the original units, for a total of one hundred units, in the scale."
"That's going to be a lot of work."
Clarity looked at the emotion scale. The attributes of a person listed ranged from reasonable and logical, level-headed, clear-headed, professional and competent, to emotional, impulsive, easily annoyed, hostile, or showing a tendency to over-react. All those latter attributes were what Herbaline called reactive attributes of a personality, when, according to Clarity, the person was really showing critical judgement or the ability to disagree, the ability to think on her own. The rightmost area of the chart showed the word bliss, the unexplored area of human pleasure which lied after pleasure, casually explained by the chart, as any form of pleasure that the person feels, at times combined with arousal, sexual arousal in particular. She saw that Manglove was working with a remote that controlled a screen displayed in front of her. There was a brief click noise, flashing the words arousal and bliss, with a definition for each, followed by generic words, such as sexual bliss and love, and words related to the business of Herbaline, like purchase, consumption, private property, hastily shown one after the next by Manglove. For Herbaline, arousal, not money, ruled the world, including the world of business.
"Work on the chart and let me know what you find," said Manglove.
The emotician left the room, leaving Clarity on her own. She reached for the remote, but the device did not work, a connection had been turned off by Manglove, and the screen, did not show any text. The computer was off. The rightmost area of the room had a panel. Clarity opened it and found a copy of a document labeled confidential. Oddly, it was a dictionary, a book written in-house by the writing specialists of Herbaline, the glossary department, those who had created the electronic dictionary and translator, Wordlay, which is what Clarity had seen onscreen showing some Herbaspeak used in-house. The password access sheet for the remote was shown underneath the dictionary, depicting a single word. She turned on the computer of Manglove, and typed the word pennyshow on the color application software Sterial Drawmeadow. The onscreen projector turned on when she pressed enter and she used the mouse of the computer to guide and navigate through the content of the dictionary.
The preface of the glossary showed that words and 'marketing linguistics' defined the company's trade secrets, strategic business plan, and overall business compass for the company, placing sales and salespeople at the top of the company. The Wordlay emotion translator, made by a company showing as Ballmacks Instruments, listing a single office in Asia, was a log of all of the sales technique landmarks accomplished by the company.
Clarity noticed a red signal on the upper left side of the screen. She pressed on the square and the screen projector turned into chat mode.
"Hello there."
"Who are you?" Asked Clarity, typing calmly on the keyboard.
"I'm Ambi, I'm held as recluse at Herbaline, at the Palm Springs Language facility."
"Are you connected to the dictionary?"
"I think so, they are using my skills to add definitions to the company's sales translator. I'm being asked to adopt the role of a difficult client and answer a set of emotion queries. The dictionary queried me with one word, the word emotion, and then added ten words, expanding to nearly one hundred words, linking my own various reported emotions with all of those words."
The text started trickling a cloud of words in chat mode. According to Ambi, emotion was a cluster of meaning embedded with reason, not only with emotion, in reaction to a threat or to excessive effort or adversity, a compass for daily life to restore balance, which had to do with managing and modulating flow, qualitative aspects of the person, not with assigning a number to each type of emotion, something she did not approve. Emotion had a logic and it was the reason for surviving alongside the rational, as part of evolution, for thousands of years.
"How big is the cluster, and what exactly is the cluster of meaning here at Herbaline," said Clarity.
The door opened, showing Manglove, handbook of emotion in hand, Lanai behind her.
"You naughty girl," said Manglove, "you've explored our sales glossary, and how it links to emotion, I hope Ambi did not confuse your thinking with her emotion-is-good rhetoric."
Manglove turned off the emotion translator and showed Clarity and Lanai a board listing a piece of paper in chalk-like font showing her name.
"You are clearly emotional in your work, Clarity, you have reached and tapped the emotional point of our emotion scale, bypassing your common sense and ability to close a sale."
The scale monitor suggested the range of Clarity's emotional reactions was related to exhibitionism, to her extroverted personality, and to her word cloud, which was yet to be defined by her in the official dictionary of the company. According to the emotion scale interpreters, a group of people working out of the language facility of Herbaline in Palm Springs, it was difficult to throw Clarity 'out of the positive area of the dictionary', where positive meant the favorable or amiable area of the dictionary in terms of words used by Clarity. The word favorable spit out in stock market feed mode out of the projector text screen, just as Clarity and Lanai read it.
"What is this feed, Coley?" Asked Lanai.
Manglove blushed at the feminine voice of Lanai.
"The emotion scale monitor is a wifi computer using speech recognition software that can actually record anybody's thought, it is tuned to our voices Lanai, and to our group of interpreters."
"Can it think and explain what you are thinking, then, or the logic of the company's sales manual?" Asked Clarity. Coley Manglove showed a poker face, unmoved by the comment of Clarity.
The projector spit out a set of sentences coming from the group of interpreters. Those dastardly women, they found out that Herbaline monitors the conversation of employees and that it uses a sales manual.
"We saw that," said Clarity. She pointed to the screen.
"We'd like to see your thoughts on us," said Clarity, "we'd like to see on the computer screen feed what you are thinking about us, what you have been thinking about us."
> There was a brief pause of several seconds during which nothing was said. Manglove did not move. Lanai moved. She moved towards the projector, open-mouthed, marvelled at the technology shown to her for the first time, a technology unknown to her having to do with language.
"Is this available for sale? I want to know what Taimi and Jenna think, about the perfect boyfriend that is, simply by recording their conversation about shopping."
"Think serious, Lanai," said Clarity, "a computer can't relate conversation to love life." Manglove pressed the off-button to cut short any possibilities of love spying for Lanai, to disconnect the projector.
"Your reaction to your friend is nonsense Clarity," said Manglove, "you are being closed-minded, you are more emotional than you think. I'm going to put you back on sales work before you get to the chart of emotion. Please get back to work, to sales work, you have to get rid of five boxes of our herbal tea which still shows in your inventory. And you have to pay for those boxes if you don't sell the merchandise to a customer or to another Herbaline sales person."
"I'm not doing well here," said Clarity, "or it may be sales, not sure." Manglove looked at the emotion scale diagram of Clarity, showing her profile, and made up her mind.
"In Palm Springs you can do well there working for Herbaline, you'll work on the chart of emotion. You are catching the five forty plane this afternoon on Cayman Caribbean Airlines, heading back to Orange County. Fletcher will drive you to Palm Springs."
In the afternoon, Clarity and Lanai reached their seat, where a hostess, Ivy, greeted them. Ivy was dressed as a Cayman Caribbean hostess, in grayish skirt and matching shirt, with a green scarf matching the green color of the Herbaline clover. Herbaline was a shareholder of Cayman Caribbean airlines, and was slowly infiltrating various managing aspects of the airline. Ivy handed them a badge with their 'emotion label' rating, which said capital F, for fluffy, along with a report written by Manglove, and an ID, a number that was similar to the one extended by the department of motor vehicles in California.
Clarity read the report, labeled 'bad girl report', a ten page report with solved assignments, purportedly meant to lower her excessive emotional display and to curb her tendency to disagree or be 'hostile' to ideas that clashed with her own. Remedies included spanking, by Lanai on Clarity, soft spanking, for hours, four hours in particular, a mighty long time, thought Clarity, looking at Lanai listen to the music coming out of her seat with the earphones offered by the attractive hostess. Clarity waved at Ivy, and asked her about the chart of emotion and whether there was a comprehensive one.
"There is a genuine chart of emotion, but it is not made available to regular employees of Herbaline, it is only shown to level five and above employees of Herbaline, those deft at relational pairing working with the relational brain, those who have adopted the relational outlook of the company, the polyamorous outlook, and are able to apply that method to build a collaborative environment at work."
Clarity thought for a second, and stared into the eyes of Ivy.
"I'd like to be paired together with Lanai, then," said Clarity, "because I'm working on the chart of emotion and she is as well."
Ivy nodded and glossed over the naughty manual that Clarity was reading. It would be a close, very close sensual escapade, carefree, but she would spank Clarity eventually, softly, for hours, to turn her into an obedient employee of Herbaline, obedient to her own arousal, and wet to engage in it fully aware, so that she could bring in inventory sales for her. Ivy was a level two employee and watching Clarity closely is what Coley had told her to do. It was the right thing to do, as Coley was good at managing Herbaline inventory, in addition to understanding arousal quite well.