A Life With the Nakeds
Fiction fragment by Clark Humphrey
2/8/99
Once the cost-cutting fad of ’90s corporate life had given way to the spend-to-grow fad of ’00s corporate life, all manner of consultants and subcontractors blossomed blossomed amid the urban-office landscape, claiming to have the latest and greatest schemes to improve worker productivity while ensuring a happy, fully-functional work environment. From this came the mini-industry that became known by ’08 as the Nakeds, women hired by major corporations to do nothing but be beautiful.It’s a wonder nobody thought of it before–a whole industry of hiring young women to stand and walk around naked. And not in the protective environment of nudie bars but in ordinary lounges and restaurants, malls, offices, stores, factory break-rooms, anywhere the sight of an attractive body would be an unexpected treat.
In workday environments, regular female employees got to mock the Nakeds under their breaths, and also got more work done as male co-workers’ sexual attention was diverted away, efficiently and chastely, by the ever-polite Nakeds.
(Indeed, some female middle-managers arranged to have their open-office landscapes decorated by only the largest-breasted, bubbliest Nakeds–the types of women proven in clinical studies to turn men into inattentive idiots, thus giving the female middle-managers a distinct advantage in the old corporate-ladder-climb.)
Before state and local health departments started to crack down on the presence of Nakeds in foodservice environments, they stimulated appetites and could, by their carefully-timed appearances and disappearances, regulate seating durations.
This story will relate the life story of a soon-to-retire Naked. Her geisha-like training in propriety, poise, grace under intimidation, and service (even while essentially doing nothing). How the career’s affected her private life (does she, like some other Nakeds, try to dress up as lavishly as possible whenever not working? Is she only comfortable having sex while wearing something?).
What happened to her career standing when male Naked began to infiltrate the profession? How well she shrugged off and/or internalized the sometime uncouth remarks of some men and the often-condescending stares of some women. Living for up to 40 hours a week in situations where everybody either felt superior to or secretly admired her or both. The friends and occasional admitted admirers she’d met.
What she’ll do now that she’s finally hit the age when no amount of working out will keep her looking delectable and heavy cosmetic surgery can no longer be considered a worthwhile investment.
She could even have been one of the first Nakeds in an office, hired after the bosses determined they could no longer justify on the balance sheet the sexpot secretaries who did nothing, and reclassified them as human-resources workers. From there, it was only a step to have them wear less and less, until Casual Friday, at one office on one day, turned into Naked Friday.
Legend has it that it was a female junior executive who thought of this final ingredient, strategizing that her male rivals for promotion would be distracted into unproductivity. It didn’t quite work out that way, but the junior executive did get to launch her own great company, supplying Nakeds for all social occasions and fighting legal battles in one jurisdiction after another to have Nakeds allowed in just about any private-property setting. Our heroine was one of the first, and may be the last of the original team still working.
