Unfocus(ed) group
Several months ago, at the federal government agency where I work (we'll call it "Agency X"), there was a call for focus group participants to provide input on a critical work-related activity. Since I'd bore you all to tears if I described the actual work activity (not to mention I'd waste an hour spelling out all the relevant acronyms), I'll use an analogy for the sake of this post.
I'm going to pretend we were channeling Mrs. Chicky and discussing dog training.
To prepare for our session, we were asked to consider how we could more effectively utilize dog training at Agency X. The facilitators expected us to share which aspects of dog training worked best for us in our jobs, and to suggest improvements for dog training at Agency X. As a special treat, one participant from each session would win a $10 gift card from the nearby shopping center.
As I walked into the room for the focus group, I realized it would be a LONG two hours. Our particular session had attracted (how do I put this delicately?) some of the most unusual personalities from across Agency X:
- My coworker, Bizarre Bob: a nice guy, but completely lacking in social skills.
- Techie Tim: always talks about segmentation faults, null pointer exceptions, and other techno-speak that just doesn't resemble English.
- Judgmental Joanie: perpetually smug and ready to impart her vast tombs of knowledge to all of us less brilliant people.
- Whiny Wendy: relatively new to Agency X and (as evidenced by her perennially sour expression) regards it as completely inferior to her previous place of employment.
At the beginning of the session, we were reminded that we only had two hours to discuss the broad range of issues related to canine behavior, so we should focus on the most relevant aspects of the topic.
The facilitators, young and optimistic, smiled broadly as we introduced ourselves. Obviously they had no idea what kind of hell the next two hours would bring.
Every time a new topic was introduced, one of my fellow participants seemed hell bent on driving the train of relevant thought right off the tracks and having it crash into a fiery ball at the bottom of a cliff. To wit:
Facilitator: Tell me your thoughts about leashes. How can they be used effectively?
Judgmental Joanie: Well, I ALWAYS keep my cat indoors just like I should so that it won't roam free.
Techie Tim: There's an incredible new device you can attach to a pet door so that you COULD let your cat out, and an embedded microchip on its leash would trigger the door via infrared. You see, it works through a radio signal at a frequency that is seemingly... (continues in similar vein for the next 389 seconds)
Whiny Wendy: Well, I'm new here, but I don't think Agency X's cats could possibly be trained to use a cat door. But at my former agency, not only could cats open doors, but they had opposable thumbs.
Bizarre Bob: I don't have a pussy.
...
Facilitator: OK, let's talk about aggressive behavior in your dogs. How do you deter it, and how do you reward them for behaving appropriately toward other animals and people?
Whiny Wendy: I've only been here a few months, but it seems to me that there's MUCH more aggressive behavior by dogs here than in the other places I have worked. At the last federal agency where I worked, the dogs were all nice and their poop smelled like strawberries.
Bizarre Bob: Speaking of poop smelling like strawberries, did anyone try the strawberry shortcake at the cafeteria this afternoon? It was delicious.
Techie Tim: At the farm near my house they use a hydroponic process to cultivate the strawberries. An amazing water injection system with 752 feet of PVC pipe hooked up to an anti-compression well that is constantly replenished with mineral water. The sensors staged throughout the field can detect when the hydration levels drop below the optimal percentage, and... (he continued in this thread for infinity, so I passed out, and when I woke up he was still talking.)
Judgmental Joanie: I only eat ORGANIC strawberries, from a sweet little farm in the mountains that only employs dwarves who were discriminated against in their former places of employment.
...
And so on. And so on. Excruciatingly so.
...
You can imagine that after 2 hours of this crap I was ready to pull out all my hair and/or head to the bar for a few stiff drinks. If *I* felt that bad, you can bet your bottom dollar that the facilitators were hurting -- by the end of the session, they were sweating and their faces looked strained from the superhuman effort it took to keep them smiling. But they were consummate professionals, thanking us profusely before ushering us out the door (and probably wishing it would hit us on our asses on the way out).
I had all but purged the painful memory of forgotten about the focus group when Bizarre Bob stopped me in the hall last month.
"Guess what, I won the gift card for our session!" he told me. "You and I and Techie Tim should go get lunch at the shopping center next week!" I briefly considered the potentially painful lunch conversation that would ensue, but decided I would take one for the team. "Sure, let's do lunch!" I agreed.
The following week, Bizarre Bob walked into my office -- to try and set up a time for lunch, I figured. Instead, he handed me a $5 bill. "Well, it turns out that the shopping center stopped issuing gift cards, so they gave us cash instead. Here's your share. Have a nice lunch!"
I was about to suggest that we still have lunch together (because couldn't we still use CASH for that purpose??) but he was out the door before I could even say "poop smelling like strawberries."
So much for bonding over our focus group experience. But at least I'll always have my fond memories.
Epilogue: I saw Whiny Wendy in the bathroom this afternoon, which reminded me that I needed to finish up this post. I asked her how she was doing, and she sighed before answering: "Great, thanks. Glad it's Friday. But at my old agency they had much nicer bathrooms..."
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