Editor’s note: After a three-year absence, War Stories is back! The column is a semi-regular feature in which Art Shulman, president of Shulman Research, Van Nuys, Calif., presents humorous anecdotes of life in the research trenches.
Without your stories, there can be no War Stories! If you want to ensure future installments, send your own (or a colleague’s) tales of research-related wackiness to Shulman at artshulman@aol.com. Contributors may remain anonymous in print.
Recently I was moderating a focus group in a facility located in a high-rise building in a large city. It was the second group of the evening and the time was about 9:15 p.m. One of my clients had, a few minutes earlier, brought me four new packages, which were supposed to replace other packages I was showing. When I was about to show the fourth package I realized I didn’t know which of the existing packages it was replacing. So I excused myself and went to the viewing room to ask.
To my surprise, no one was there. My three clients - good-looking young men all - were gone!
I went to the lobby and the hostesses weren’t there. I called out for them. No response. I called louder. Silence. I walked around to other areas of the focus group complex, looking for them. No luck!
I returned to the focus room and continued with the discussion. Just then, my cell phone rang. Respondents had been asked ahead of time to shut their phones down, but no one had asked me to do so.
Normally, I wouldn’t have answered, but this situation was unusual. The Caller ID indicated it was one of my clients. The three of them had gone outside the building - to make calls, he said, since cell phones didn’t work well inside (though mine appeared to be working just fine). They had asked the two lovely young hostesses to join them.
So all five went outside, not realizing that the doors of the building automatically locked at 9 p.m. Moreover, both hostesses had forgotten to take along their keys.
My client asked if I would mind coming downstairs to open the door for them. I pretty well had no choice. I was the only person at the facility, except for my respondents, and it just wouldn’t be right to ask one of them to do it. So I excused myself, took the elevator down to the first floor and let my clients back in.
They did not complain later when I ran out of time to cover some of the subjects I was supposed to address.
When my friend Larry Sherman of DIRECTV received a notice that I’d be conducting a statistics workshop for the American Marketing Association he e-mailed me and expressed the hope that I wouldn’t be heckled. (I think heckling came to his mind since he sometimes does stand-up at comedy clubs.)
I e-mailed him back, advising him that I’d handle any heckler by pointing out to the rest of the group that this person was a perfect example of a standard deviation, if not a standard error. Further, I’d tell the heckler, “You are regressing to be mean.”
Sherman was appreciative of how I’d handle the situation, and wrote back that he could see that I was in a humor “mode.” He also asked if, since we were both playing with words, and acting like kids, we could call what we were doing “multiple regression.”
He then notified me that the research department at Mack Trucking Company was presenting a new statistical technique to management and calling it “Mack’s factor analysis.”
Judith Emilie of Judith Emilie Transcription Service had a problem collecting an invoice from a new client. After mailing multiple copies of her invoice over several months, she finally sent an e-mail to remind him of the unpaid invoice. He e-mailed back, saying he would send out payment, even though he hadn’t yet been paid by his client (a reasoning which, she noted to me, would never work for her at the supermarket).
As an additional excuse, Emilie’s client mentioned that his firm was only a small company. However, the automated signature at the bottom of his e-mail indicated that his “small company” just happened to have offices in New York, Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco.
Fay Parker of Market Research and Analysis reports that years ago she was supervising a telephone bank and noticed that over a few hours one particular interviewer, a new hire, hadn’t completed any interviews, while other interviewers on the project had all completed several. When she approached the interviewer she found out why: The interviewer had her mouth wired, because of an obesity problem, and was virtually unintelligible.
In future issues, we hope to report on more quirky, loopy and strange happenings in the world of market research. But we can’t do it without you! If you’d like your story to be told - anything related to research is usable, from spilling soup on your client’s new suit to cute answers respondents provide on questionnaires - please e-mail me at artshulman@aol.com. You may remain anonymous in print, if you wish.