Do you know it's going to be an interesting day when you almost get arrested before 9:30 in the morning? I am currently working on the new business book, which is the corporate application of understanding men, like For Women Only, but in the workplace.
I have been having a very interesting time as I research for the books, because I have to write up survey questions and then test them. It has been easy to test the survey questions for the teenage books which I have been doing over the last few years. Because if you go to the average shopping mall and stop kids in the food court and say you will pay them $5 to take a survey, all the kids are like “heck yeah”, they are eager and they want to talk. But as I learned when I was researching For Women Only, it is much harder to test the survey questions for men, because for most men, $5 is not much of an incentive to take the survey.
So my research assistant, Jackie, and I decided to test the surveys by riding MARTA, which is our local subway system, up and down the line, to and from the airport, during rush hour. We began to ask the men on the MARTA train whether they would be interested in participating in this research by taking a 10-minute survey.
Most of the men were very willing, a few were busy and didn't want to, which was fine, but most of them were very willing. Then in the last half hour, a police officer came up to me and said, “I have been watching you for the last 15 minutes, what are you doing?” I said, “I am taking surveys,” to which he replied, “no solicitation is allowed.”
I realized after he explained that asking men if they want to take a survey, sounds like a solicitation, and had explained contritely to him that I did not know that it was solicitation and forbidden. He gave me an official criminal trespass warning! As he went off to capture my research assistant in another car, I asked the police officer, if he could just be nice and not scare her, because she was, after all, working for me.
I left behind a subway car full of amused people who thought the interaction was pretty funny. Jackie and I realized, we are going to have to find another way to test our survey questions. But it was a unique and amusing beginning to the day.
So we are going to have to get creative and find a completely different way to test these questions. I have a feeling that I am going to be walking up and down the aisles of the 747, asking the men on the airplane to take a survey, during my flight to Seattle on Thursday. Oh my, I hope that isn’t viewed as solicitation.