She's So Co-o-old

Longtime readers of WAF may remember that I had spent a lot of time over the years, off and on, doing this hearing experiment at the University of Minnesota.  It was a type of study where I would put on headphones, sit in front of a computer, hear a series of bloops and blips and select which of what usually were three tones was different from the others.  In my very unemployed days, I would be at this lab three days a week, two hours at a time.  It wasn't much -- it's only ten bucks an hour -- but it gave me a sense of purpose.  Otherwise I would be just hanging out and living life.  That's great, but I know I would get really flabby if I spent summer after summer without any commitments whatsoever.

I hadn't been at the lab for at least a couple years.  They always have fliers going up about some experiments going on, and I e-mail the particular tech spearheading them, but I never get a reply.  The last time I did do a session there I fell asleep and she caught me because she had a monitor which had the session on her computer and she noticed that I hadn't hit any of the numbers to indicate I was actually listening to these bleeps and bloops.  So yeah, maybe I had a reason to avoid them.

But then, a couple weeks ago, out of the blue, the main professor of the lab and a tech e-mailed me about a session.  I felt flattered to be invited back for something that wasn't going to last too long -- two sessions and the second probably wouldn't last two hours.

The first session was last night; although I was dead tired from work and the night, I made it a couple minutes early.  When I rang the doorbell I saw this big-eyed beauty with faint Nordic facial features and a sweater with dots on it that was short enough where, if she bent over enough you could see the small of her back, but let's not dwell on that.

Instead, let's dwell on the fact that she was a cold millennial.  I wasn't looking for five-star service from a restaurant or anything, but when we got done with the first portion of this special test, where I had to take out these one-time-use ear plugs and I didn't know where to put them, she said, "You can throw them in the wastebasket outside.  We'll be moving to another booth."  Now, I wasn't expecting her to take those plugs and throw them away for me.  But ... it was just the tone of her voice that kind of set me off.  And her body language and her ... uh, non-warm way of speaking with me, and the fact that she wouldn't hold open the heavy booth doors for me even though I needed to open them to get around her and into the booths -- she just struck me as disinterested, like I was a part of a process she needed to get through just so she can say she did it.  I don't know, I guess you had to be there.

The worst part, however, came at the end.  I got there at 6, so I should have been done at 8.  At 7:54 she pops her head into the booth and tells me there is one 15-minute session left; I could come back another day, or I could just stay a bit later and finish the whole experiment.  (Guess that first session became the only session.)  I figured I might as well stay and finish this whole damn thing.

So, around 8:11 I get out of the booth with absolutely no help from her.  She opens up this locked file where all the money is.  I need to fill out my information in order to get the money.  Now, this is ten bucks an hour.  I stayed an extra, oh, 11 minutes.  It would stand to reason that since I stayed a little longer (and remember I got to the lab a little early, which is rare, I will admit), I would get paid a little more.  How much that bitch pay me?  Twenty bucks.  For two hours and 11 minutes, I got paid the same as two hours.  Was it because I went to the bathroom an hour into the session?  That'd be news to me; before I took 15 minutes to poop in the men's room, and I still got paid $20 for two hours total.

I got this dismissive and unwelcoming vibe from this student, this millennial very early into my work at the lab, and when I learned that she was stiffing me money, well, I was kind of glad I was leaving and hopefully never seeing her again, even though in retrospect I should have left and done the session another day because then I would get fully paid for my time.  As I write this I wonder if I should send a message to the professor about this -- not to get more money, but to cover my ass in case I have to complain about this again.

Nah, I probably won't.  No reason to pick fights in a war I don't plan on re-joining, to strain a metaphor.