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.

Joel Reish of Next Level Research reports that one time, while in the middle of moderating a focus group in a room with no windows, the power went out, plunging the room into utter darkness. He literally could not see his hand in front of his face. Reish told everyone not to panic, but a couple of respondents had their own ideas; one began to cry, and another began to completely freak out.

Reish opened the door but there was no light anywhere. He tried to calm everyone, telling them that someone from the research company surely would be coming in any second. But no one did.

After a minute with no help arriving, Reish called out down the hall. But no one answered.

He told the respondents to sit tight and went to find someone, feeling his way blindly down the halls of a research facility he had never been in before. When he could not find anyone, he tried to make his way back to the focus group room but couldn’t find it. He remembered as a kid reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the part where Tom gets lost in a cave.

After about 15 very long minutes Reish and the respondents were finally rescued, but they were no longer in the mood to talk research anymore that night.

And Reish now travels everywhere with a pocket flashlight in his briefcase.

He also reports that he once conducted a central location test on concepts and packaging in a very large hotel that was packed with about 1,000 guests due to a convention unrelated to the research project. About halfway through the two-hour test, Reish told everyone they could take a quick bathroom break. Since smoking wasn’t allowed in the room where the test was being done, smokers used the bathroom break as their opportunity to puff away.

Reish was waiting for people to trickle back into the room to continue the test when suddenly the fire alarm went off. Reish ran out the door, down the hallway, and there on the floor he found an ashtray with about 10 still-smoldering butts in it. He looked up at the ceiling, and directly overhead was a smoke detector. The smokers had all found each other, crowded around a single ashtray, and created a thick cloud right under the smoke detector.

Meanwhile, the crowded hotel was going nuts. People were evacuating, security guys with walkie-talkies were running around, the front desk was mobbed with confused guests.

Finally, Reish grabbed one walkie-talkie guy and told him that it was a false alarm. The guy looked at Reish very strangely, thinking that either he was joking with him or else he was right about the alarm being false and the only way he would know that is if he was the one who set it off. Reish grabbed the guy by the sleeve and dragged him down the hall to show him the ashtray.

“Look,” Reish said, pointing to the smoldering evidence.

“So?” the guy snapped, getting very testy.

“So look at that,” Reish replied, pointing straight up at the smoke detector. The guy rolled his eyes, mumbled into his walkie-talkie, and the alarm soon went silent.

Reish reports that he was somewhat suspicious of the results respondents provided after the test session resumed.

In another hotel-related event, Ed Sugar reports conducting an on-site study where data was collected on a PDA. The results were tabulated at the end of the day in his hotel room and the printed tabulations were then delivered to the client.

One day, the printer his company was using broke. Sugar’s technician called the concierge and, in a panic and speaking very quickly, told the man, “My printer died. Can you help me?”

The concierge responded, “I’m sorry. I can’t really help you,” and the two of them hung up. A half-hour later, there was a knock on the door. When the technician opened the door, the concierge was standing there with a bouquet of flowers. The technician asked why he was getting flowers.

The concierge replied, “I’m so sorry your partner died.”