belle and the umbrella question
about a week and a half ago, i got a phone call from a recruiter, but not the kind you'd think (or you would if you've noticed how much i'm struggling with the changes to my job lately.) no, this caller was clearly new at his job finding participants for marketing focus groups. he asked me a few diabetes questions, and then we got to the best part, the fun question by which he was clearly quite embarrassed.
"name five uses for an umbrella besides protection from the rain."
my answers:
a cane
tool for picking things up off the ground
a canvas for concave/convex artwork
an elaborate fishbowl
a way to fly
and so i was selected as one of ten participants in the study. i would be contacted and given instructions for a "blogging" portion of the study (for $50). yay paid blogging! then two of the ten participants would be chosen for a longer study paying $300. yay $300!
two days later, i was told i'd been chosen (without benefit of the blogging, whatever that was going to be) as one of the two, and as part of the $300 study i would be videotaped. a camera crew would come to my house and talk with me and observe my "diabetic spaces", then watch me and some friends "enjoying a meal". a camera crew?! i mused about how i would probably not be the diabetic they were expecting to meet, and cleaned the house like mad.
the day came, the house was duly tamed, and the camera crew arrived. brian, the senior researcher, sounded just like a particularly hapless developer i work with, which was distracting. jo was a classically beautiful blonde from england and clearly the talkative one, and alex was a dark, handsome guy on the shorter side, from st. petersburg, with perfect manners.
i talked and talked - we were scheduled for three hours total, but went to "enjoy our meal" late because they kept me talking so long. i ran them out of battery for the videocamera by doing things like holding forth about why we can have gorgeous ipods with adorable little cases and whatnot, but blood sugar meters, equally expensive, equally electronic, and just as frequently used by the same age bracket, are invariably, starkly, medically ugly. they kept scribbling frantically, and at the end of it all, they told me that they picked me for the videotaping because of my demonstrated willingness to play along. that's what the umbrella question was all about.
jo promised to e-mail me a copy of some of the other fun questions they used in the screening after i told her how many of my friends had immediately wanted to play along when i told them the question. (let me just say right now that jo and her accent can e-mail me anything she wants, uh-huh.) she paid for dinner, hugged me goodbye, thanked me for being "the best we've had yet" and gave me $300; if you take the videotaping into account, this was a better date than i've had in months. ;)
"name five uses for an umbrella besides protection from the rain."
my answers:
a cane
tool for picking things up off the ground
a canvas for concave/convex artwork
an elaborate fishbowl
a way to fly
and so i was selected as one of ten participants in the study. i would be contacted and given instructions for a "blogging" portion of the study (for $50). yay paid blogging! then two of the ten participants would be chosen for a longer study paying $300. yay $300!
two days later, i was told i'd been chosen (without benefit of the blogging, whatever that was going to be) as one of the two, and as part of the $300 study i would be videotaped. a camera crew would come to my house and talk with me and observe my "diabetic spaces", then watch me and some friends "enjoying a meal". a camera crew?! i mused about how i would probably not be the diabetic they were expecting to meet, and cleaned the house like mad.
the day came, the house was duly tamed, and the camera crew arrived. brian, the senior researcher, sounded just like a particularly hapless developer i work with, which was distracting. jo was a classically beautiful blonde from england and clearly the talkative one, and alex was a dark, handsome guy on the shorter side, from st. petersburg, with perfect manners.
i talked and talked - we were scheduled for three hours total, but went to "enjoy our meal" late because they kept me talking so long. i ran them out of battery for the videocamera by doing things like holding forth about why we can have gorgeous ipods with adorable little cases and whatnot, but blood sugar meters, equally expensive, equally electronic, and just as frequently used by the same age bracket, are invariably, starkly, medically ugly. they kept scribbling frantically, and at the end of it all, they told me that they picked me for the videotaping because of my demonstrated willingness to play along. that's what the umbrella question was all about.
jo promised to e-mail me a copy of some of the other fun questions they used in the screening after i told her how many of my friends had immediately wanted to play along when i told them the question. (let me just say right now that jo and her accent can e-mail me anything she wants, uh-huh.) she paid for dinner, hugged me goodbye, thanked me for being "the best we've had yet" and gave me $300; if you take the videotaping into account, this was a better date than i've had in months. ;)