Editor's note: War Stories is a semi-regular feature in which Art Shulman, president of Shulman Research, Van Nuys, Calif., presents humorous stories of life in the research trenches.

Diane Trotta of Trotta Associates tells about a guy recruited to participate in a focus group. He showed up in the lobby, signed in, and filled out the paperwork the session required. He was then ushered into the focus room. A few short minutes later the moderator asked the guy to leave. Trotta, standing outside, wondered what the guy had said to get himself kicked out. When she approached him and asked, his speech was slurred, and his lips were moving funny.

Turns out that after being recruited over the phone a week earlier, the guy had had surgery, after which his jaw had been wired shut. He recognized that he couldn't talk (and be easily understood), but he came to the group anyway, explaining through a clenched mandible, "I can still listen."

Joel Reish of Next Level Research once was moderating a group of men who were all screened to have a particular radio station in a large southern city as their favorite. The room was a broad mix of guys, including one not-too-polite construction worker in a Cat Tractor cap.

At one point, Reish explored the topic of the disc jockeys on the respondents' favorite station. He asked participants to raise their hand if they could remember the name of the morning show host.

Construction Guy was the only one who raised his hand (perhaps one indication of why the station's ratings had slipped). The other guys looked at each other sheepishly, finding it a little embarrassing that they couldn't think of the host's name on their own favorite station. As the construction worker held up his hand, he looked around the room in disbelief and then yelled at the top of his voice, "Damn y'all! I do drugs and I know that one!"

The screaming and laughter took a while to diminish - and that was just from the clients in the back room.

Reish was once conducting focus groups among young adults who listen to new-music radio stations. The client wanted to test their reactions to a special vehicle that the station could purchase that was designed to look like a giant compact disc.

Reish showed the group a picture in which the huge 15-foot-high disc was on a trailer hooked to a truck, with people standing in front and trees in the background. Reish explained to the group that it was a mock-up of a giant CD, and a radio station could bring it to remote events or parades and such, and the disc jockey could broadcast live from a booth inside the middle of it.

One earnest young woman squinted at it in confusion and then asked in all seriousness, "Can you play it?"

Sharon Livingston of Executive Solutions reports doing intense one-on-one interviews, delving for deep insight among a group of less-than-articulate consumers. She'd pulled out all the stops on projectives and various exercises that had always worked in the past, but it was still like pulling teeth to get a little beneath the surface with this one segment.

She had a brainstorm: She noticed that respondents were looking at magazines on a coffee table while waiting in the anteroom, so she asked one consumer to bring the magazine she was reading in with her, to use it as a source of pictures for storytelling.

The technique worked to some extent, but Livingston needed individual pictures that could be moved around, in a puzzle fashion, to really tell a complete story.

The next woman happened to be reading a copy of US magazine. Livingston asked if she'd like to bring it in to the interview. "Sure," the respondent said. While explaining the set-up, Livingston reached over, nabbed the magazine and started ripping pages out, preparing for the exercise. As Livingston went on talking, the woman's jaw dropped and her eyes opened wide. Finally, she chastised Livingston, "You know, I haven't read that yet!"

Turns out the woman had just purchased the magazine, only to have a stranger grab it and tear it apart.

When Livingston checked in with the back room after the interview, one of the marketing guys was sitting with a copy of GQ in front of him. He casually looked up and said, "Sharon, I'm not done with this one yet."

In future issues, we'll report on more quirky, loopy, and strange happenings in the world of market research. 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.