AnonymousCoworker

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of participating in a focus group about restaurants, NASCAR, and the possibility of combining the two. It should be noted that “pleasure”, in my native language, means “unfortunate experience of being exposed to the type of person who would make a perfect poster-child for the effects of eating lead paint-chips by the handful.”

Everything seemed normal when I arrived. I was shown to a room full of comfortable chairs and a heaping platter of sandwiches, of which I greedily took two. Chairs, not sandwiches. I chatted with other people as they drifted into the room, and we all mused aloud as to what the exact purpose of the focus group would be. Little did I know the focus group was a guise for a psychological test about how much stupidity a normal person could be exposed to before uncontrollably soiling himself.

We were taken into a smaller room with a two-way mirror and less comfortable chairs. This is when the brain-melting pain began, and in retrospect, it would have been nice if I had been given a few napkins, or a paper towel, because I didn’t realize I would have to fight so hard to keep my brain from liquefying within my skull and dribbling out of my ears and onto the ground.

The moderator asked us to imagine one of our favorite restaurants and I noticed that the think-tank with legs next to me had already listed three restaurants on his pad. After a few moments, she asked us to describe our favorite restaurant, and she started with the overachiever I just mentioned.

“Well, I have three,” he said.
“Name your favorite,” the moderator said politely.
“Well, if I had to name two favorites,” he continued, while a headache slowly pulsed its way into my forehead.
“Name one,” the moderator managed to say politely. I admired her restraint. If I had been in her place I would have launched into a forty minute tirade about how the man should have never passed kindergarten, much less be allowed to wipe his own ass without a signed-note from his parents and under the supervision of a battalion of trained professionals. Finally he complied and named a single restaurant, but not before trying to mention at least one of his other choices as well. The moderator quickly cut him off and asked me the same question. I named a single restaurant, and then she moved on to the next person.

“I also have a few favorites…”
“Pick one, please,” the moderator said, still somehow polite, and still somehow refraining from telling the participant that their subscription to talking had been cancelled.

And so it continued until everyone was forced to name only one favorite restaurant. I was wondering if I was going to have to write these people’s names down in order to forcibly sterilize them later, or if natural selection would save me the trouble of doing so by having them think that cleaning their outlets with a wet soup-spoon was a fantastic idea.

As the focus group continued, the dumbening increased exponentially. The participants must have slowly realized they were all part of a randomly gathered group of lobotomy survivors and the “helpful opinions to drool” ratio was quickly spiralling into number ranges better served by discussing the population of Asia. Questions about their opinions of a NASCAR themed restaurant were met with long-winded answers that started with catering, meddled briefly in suggestions against placing any number of foreign objects into one’s own anus, and ended with a humorless anecdote about how cars go “beep.”

Just when it looked like the group was willing to move into yet another hour of talking about the broad and irreconcilable differences between radically different restaurants such as TGIFriday’s, Applebee’s, Ruby Tuesday, and Chili’s, we were escorted from the room and given $105. I grabbed the cash and ran for the door as fast as I could, hoping that I’d be able to shower before all the dumb-dumb germs penetrated too deeply and I was left with an inexplicable craving to drive 10 miles an hour below the speed limit in the left lane with my right-hand blinker on for six miles while talking on my cell-phone to a pet-psychic about whether or not my taxidermied parakeet had seasonal affective disorder, all the while on my way to my job at Wal-Mart to pick up my paycheck that I planned on blowing on lottery tickets and a money-order for a pleasant Nigerian bureaucrat who wanted to give me millions of dollars of my long-lost dead uncle’s money that I planned on using for buying more subscriptions to Reader’s Digest in order to win the Publisher’s Clearing House grand prize.