My Four Jobs

On Friday, September 16, I was a part of four jobs at the University of Minnesota. I started off my day dropping off the piss I collected overnight. Then I had to go to another building and listen to children's voices for about an hour. I don't remember whether I was late, because an hour later I had to walk down to the next building on campus to do my usual hearing lab stuff.

Finally, after an hour break, I had to cross banks to go the business school and undertake a study the likes of which I've never done before. It was interesting. First, I had to queue up within a group of, like, 30 people and tell the people my e-mail address. Studies I've done are never this rigid and formal. Then I sat down in a walled-off cubicle with a desktop and instructions. Then I was told to quietly read the instructions but not do anything until told to start.

And then the study itself was kind of intense ... but very intriguing. It was split into two parts. The first part was 40 questions I needed to answer in a certain time period. It basically was the Wunderlich test, the quiz prospective college players get at the National Football League Combine to see if they should be drafted. In fact, I think on the screen it was called "The Wunderlich."

I think I got the last answer just at the buzzer, but I don't know because I had to hit the radio button two times because I didn't put the cursor on the button the first time.

The second part was also something I had never done before: I was automatically networked, through the computer, to three other people in the same room (based, according to the instructions, on how many answers I got right and in how fast a time period). We then had to Internet Message chat to come up with the answers to four questions. Two of them related to predicting future sales based on a hypothetical business chart, one asked us to guesstimate how many dentists there are in the United States, and one was a bagels-type game (anybody remember Bagels?) where we had to predict the correct sequence of four colors. The pressure was on: The closer we got to the correct answer, supposedly the more money we would make.

I think we did OK, although there was no way we would've gotten the dentists question correct (the answer that I just looked up online: About 186,000 as of two years ago, according to the American Dental Association). And I felt proud to get an extra two dollars for getting the correct sequence with two guesses to spare: I picked out two colors to use twice in the sequence, and none of them showed up, which narrowed down the pattern really quick.

The bad thing, however, is that I think I cost us some money. When we agreed on an answer for all the questions beside the bagels game, we all had to input the same answer on our own screen. And, just like the first part, these exercises in the second part were all timed. The first question, one of the sales projections ones, was very complicated; we had to predict how many something-or-others were at six different months. We were debating for most of the period, and we were furiously trying to first agree to the number and then put it in. Well, I'm not sure if I hit the "Send" or "Submit" button in time. Just like on the last question on the Wunderlich test, I may have not put my cursor on the button in time for me to enter my answer in time. That could have cost my group, oh, five bucks. That's a meal right there.

Nonetheless, a very productive day. In fact, a very enjoyable way to work while getting a good walk around on what I think was a pretty day outside. Would I want to do this for a living? It may get to be old, but right now, as of this moment, I'd say yes.