Techno-bozo

Last Friday I did a focus group. Now I've done my fair share of these things over the years; I even recruited for a few during my razzle-dazzle days as a "trend forecaster". (I will never stop loving the sound of that. It's practically magical.) For those of you who've never done one, you sign up online at one of the various focus group places, and if your stats (age, income, job) match up with a group you get a call. At that point your job is to lie, lie, lie. Seriously. As one who's spend hours desperately trying to find a 20-25 year-old Asian male who makes $70 - 100K and only drinks Cuervo, you just want someone who fits the suit.* The recruiters often make your job easy, steering you towards the proper response ("Are you sure you only exercise twice a week? Do you sometimes exercise more?") so really, all you have to do is remember your occupation (you can't be an actor so make something up. Right now I'm fond of sales - nice and open to interpretation - but for a long time I was an exceptionally well-paid tutor) and show up on time to collect your dough. They're always about something really dopey like shampoo or running shoes ("Why yes I AM a marathon runner!") so it's pretty easy to bluff your way through. Sometimes it's even interesting, seeing the prototypes and being asked your opinion, like they might actually take it into consideration.

This particular group was focusing on digital technology. Now, I pride myself on being an early adopter (see Trend Forecaster) and can pretty much tell you anything you want to know about a whole mess o' crap, but I don't know squat about digital technology. I don't own a laptop. My cell phone is the one I got for free when I joined Sprint. I've never once sent a text message. Still, I figure I can b.s. my way through it.

Rule #1: You cannot fake knowledge of digital technology.

I show up at the Westin inTimes Square and try to pick out the other frauds, but all I see are a group of slightly puffy looking people carrying gadgets that would not be amiss on an episode of Star Trek. (I make a mental note not to pull out my cell phone.) We head upstairs and meet Damien (his real name), then go around the room and introduce ourselves, telling everyone what we do. Two owned large consulting firms, one was a lawyer, one did something with sports marketing that required a huge amount of travel, one was a fine art dealer, one was a sound technician on Broadway, one owned her own clothing line and one was in, uh, "sales". Damien mentioned that they'd overbooked the evening so he took a look around, then handed the sound technician and the clothing designer their cash and sent them home. Luckily (?), he kept me.

"We've called you here because you are the experts!" Damien started out by asking each of us to tell him about our personal favorite piece of digital technology. Sports guy nattered on about his Blackberry while one of the consultants expounded on the virtues of the iRiver versus the iPod. Other consultant owned a Fugimoto laptop that was compatable with a blahbadeeblahblah - and then it was my turn. I tried to fake it by saying that I was "embarrassed to admit" that I owned a Compaq Presario but that I was "obviously looking to upgrade".

"Oh! Which direction are you thinking?"

I muttered something about Apple's fantastic design team and tried to change the subject to the joys of iPod ownership (ah, safety!) but Damien was having none of it.

"Which models are you considering?"

Have I mentioned Rule #1?

Finally we had to draw our version of the perfect piece of mobile digital technology, including gigabytes (or was it megabytes?) , screen size, price point. I kept trying to pretend that I wasn't about all the bells and whistles but mostly I just went to the bathroom a lot and hid.

Longest two hours of my life...








*If you know this reference, you are truly the product of the 70's.