Editor's note: "War Stories" is a regular feature in which Art Shulman, president of Shulman Research, Van Nuys, Calif., presents humorous stories of life in the research trenches. Readers are invited to call or write Shulman with stories of their own.

We all know that working in market research can be sexy. We are hot! Or maybe we all feel hot because we're working too hard.

Some years ago I was involved in a series of focus groups involving sex toys. We explained to the president of the client company, inexperienced in research, that we'd need to have a lengthy warm-up period, gradually getting into the subject before we could get to the heart of the discussion. After my first group of male respondents introduced themselves, I raised the general question, "In what ways have your sexual attitudes and behaviors changed in recent years?"

A man immediately jumped in, "Well, recently I've been into mild bondage and masochism."

So much for lengthy warm-ups.

Dave Sedlin, a senior researcher at Temerlin McClain, reports a telephone study he once conducted on sauces and condiments. When informed of the subject of the study an elderly, perhaps hard of hearing, woman commented that she was offended that the interviewer would ask about such a topic, and furthermore, she couldn't understand what sausages and condoms had to do with each other in the first place.

An unnamed owner of a focus group facility tells about a new person she hired who took the specs for a project where the moderator required virgin respondents. Wanting to seem helpful, she advised him that it might be hard to find virgins. "This is Los Angeles, after all," she nicely explained. Can you imagine what the screening questions might be when recruiting virgins? Perhaps something like, "Hello, we're doing a brief survey today. Are there any virgins in your household?"

Laurie Robertson of Robertson Communications recalls a telephone survey conducted by some bureaucratic government agency which included the following question, "How many people are there in your household broken down by sex?"

Kenneth Hollander, of Kenneth Hollander & Associates, reports an interesting experience that his wife, Elise, had while working as an interviewer trainee. Doing some door-to-door interviewing, she approached a house and rang the doorbell. When no one answered, she rang again. Still no response. Determined, she then vigorously used the door knocker. Finally a man appeared and she asked to speak with the woman of the house. The man looked at her, shook his head and said, "If you want to talk to her, you'll have to wait for a while because right now we're - no, we were - making love."

One strongly suspects that this was not the sole historical instance of a market research interviewer interrupting the sex act.

Of course, researchers don't only tell tales of sex. We also have drinking stories. Alan Fine reports a study he worked on where a new board game was being considered for purchase by a toy company. In consumer testing the product fared poorly and the toy company turned it down. The game's inventor shot back a nasty letter, his missive reporting that the previous weekend a group of his friends had the most wonderful time playing his game and drinking martinis. Fine shot off a return letter, advising the inventor that the next time he submitted the game he include in the rules that players are required to drink martinis while playing.