Page 4 of Trained at the Office
It seemed her name was Trina. She worked two floors down in data entry, and from what I gathered from the whispered conversation I overheard between two women in the restroom, she’d missed a filing deadline three times in a row. Her supervisor had issued two formal warnings. The third time, Trina had been escorted to the discipline room in human resources.
“She came back to her desk an hour later,” one of the women said, reapplying lipstick with a steady hand. “Couldn’t sit down properly for the rest of the afternoon. Said it wasn’t that bad, but her eyes were all red.”
“Well,” said the other woman, adjusting her collar, “she knew the policy.”
They’d left without noticing me in the stall, and I’d stood there for a long time with my hand on the lock, my heart hammering, telling myself that Trina had missed three deadlines. That Iwould never miss three deadlines. That the paddle on the wall in HR—the stark white one with the Selecta logo that I’d glimpsed through an open door my first week and then immediately looked away from—had nothing to do with me.
But the meetings were worse than the paddling story, in a way, because the paddling was a single event I could file away as an aberration, while the meetings felt relentless and cumulative, and each one deposited another thin layer of information over my understanding of the world I’d walked into.
I learned, for instance, that birthrates in NMA-subsidized communities were up eleven percent year over year. A man named Gerald from the analytics division presented this data at a Tuesday morning briefing with the satisfaction of someone reporting excellent weather. The slide showed a map of the country dotted with small blue circles—New Modesty towns, each one representing a community where Selecta’s programs had been fully implemented—and beside each circle, a number trending upward.
“This tracks with our modeling,” Gerald said. “The combination of structured courtship, reduced female workforce participation, and the intimacy tools we’re putting in these households is doing exactly what we projected. These women are having more children, they’re having them younger, and the household satisfaction metrics are through the roof.”
I wrotebirthrates up 11%—structured courtship—intimacy toolsand tried not to think about what intimacy tools meant in the context of everything I’d already learned.
At the same meeting, Gerald showed energy-efficiency data. The NMA communities, it turned out, were consuming significantly less energy per household than comparable non-programcommunities. Gerald attributed this to ‘enhanced household compliance structures,’ which I eventually understood to mean that wives in these communities did what their husbands told them to do, including turning off lights, lowering thermostats, and hanging laundry rather than using dryers.
“Happy wife, efficient life,” Gerald said, and several people laughed.
CHAPTER 3
Anne
I did not laugh. I typedenergy efficiency up—household complianceand stared at the words until they stopped looking like English.
Paddle sales, I learned at a Thursday afternoon product review, were steady. Not growing, not declining—steady, in the way that suggested the market had reached a saturation point where every household that wanted an official Selecta discipline paddle already had one. The product team seemed untroubled by this.
“Paddles are a gateway,” said a woman named Lorraine from consumer insights. “They get us in the door—into the kitchen, really. Community surveys tell us that seventy percent of paddle households have the paddle hanging in the kitchen where she can see it every day. But the growth categories are where it gets interesting.”
The growth category that was getting the most attention, it turned out, was anal training supplies.
I remember the exact moment I first heard the phraseanal training suppliesspoken aloud in a professional setting, because my fingers actually stopped moving on the keyboard. A man named Philip from the product analytics team brought up a slide showing a steep upward curve—anal plug sales, rising quarter over quarter with no sign of plateauing.
“We’re seeing thirty-two percent growth in the anal training category across NMA communities,” Philip said, clicking to the next slide. “And here’s where it gets really interesting.” A scatter plot appeared, dense with data points, showing a correlation line that climbed unmistakably from lower left to upper right. “We’ve identified a strong positive correlation between anal training supply sales and household energy-efficiency scores.”
He paused, letting the slide speak for itself, and then continued with the air of someone presenting a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.
“Our theory—and we’re still gathering data, so I want to flag this as preliminary—is that the correlation reflects a broader pattern of wifely obedience. A wife who is undergoing regular anal training is, by definition, submitting to her husband’s authority in the most intimate and demanding way possible. That level of submission doesn’t stay in the bedroom. It permeates the household dynamic. When her husband tells her to turn off the air conditioning at nine p.m. or to limit her shower to five minutes, she does it. Not only because she cares about the electric bill, but because she’s been trained to obey.”
Several heads nodded. Someone made a note. Penelope, beside me, uncapped her pen and wrote something in the margin of her printed agenda with a neat, unhurried hand.
I typedanal training sales—energy correlation—obedience theoryand felt something inside me crack, just slightly, like a hairline fracture in porcelain. Not because I was shocked—I was past shock by then, or thought I was—but because the logic was so clean, so tidy, so presented-without-apology that it left no room for the outrage I kept expecting to feel.
These people weren’t villains twirling mustaches. They were analysts reading data. They were professionals doing their jobs. And the data said that women whose husbands put things inside their bottoms to teach them obedience were also women who turned off the lights when their husbands told them to.
I didn’t know what to do with that. So I typed it into my notes and moved on.
Eight weeks and two days after my first day at Selecta, I followed Penelope into a conference room on the thirty-sixth floor—two floors higher than our usual meeting rooms, which I’d learned by then carried significance. Higher floors meant higher stakes. The thirty-sixth floor had thicker carpet, heavier doors, and artwork on the walls that looked like it belonged in a museum rather than an office building.
The room was smaller than the one where I’d watched Karen press her thighs together on screen. An intimate round table rather than the usual oval, set with crystal water glasses and a small arrangement of white orchids at the center. Only four chairs.
Two of them were already occupied.
I noticed the man first. He was impossible not to notice. Tall even while seated, with the broad-shouldered build of someone who had been athletic in college and had maintained it withthe discipline of someone who maintained everything. His blond hair was styled with precision, and his eyes—sky blue, startlingly vivid—moved to Penelope and then to me with an appraising calm that made me feel, instantly and irrationally, like I’d been weighed and measured before I’d taken a single step into the room. He wore a dark suit so perfectly fitted it might have been sewn onto him that morning, and his watch caught the light with the quiet gleam of jewelry that cost more than my annual rent.
“Penny,” he said, and his voice was deep and smooth and carried the easy authority of a man who had never once had to raise it. “Good, you’re here. And this must be your new girl.”
“Stuart, this is Anne Chamberlain,” Penelope said, resting her hand briefly on my shoulder as she guided me to my chair. “Anne, Stuart Harrington. Executive Vice President of Strategic Development at NMB.”
