Station One

            
            It had been raining for three weeks in a row the November I signed a contract agreeing not to get a suntan for the next thirty days. I also agreed to wash my face solely with the foaming cleanser the lab provided, and that I would report to each session unshaven. The language of the contract was as bland as a mortgage application. It was early in the morning. I was barely awake. In the lobby I acquiesced to pages of terms which I barely scanned.

            On the wall by the unisex bathroom a paper sign read “Station One.” The paperwork was the first step of my induction. In the lobby of a strip mall market research firm my personal freedoms were signed away one by one. When I handed the form back to the receptionist she told me to follow the signs down the hall in a hushed librarian tone. This ensured that the seven or so other men slouched in the lobby wouldn’t be disturbed from the contracts they were pretending to read.

            I walked down the hall quietly resenting my wife, and the fact that higher education had yet to save me from dumb jobs.

Station Two

            
            I sat across from a middle-aged woman dressed in hospital scrubs, and was asked the same questions from my phone interview. Reading from a script she asked what term best described my shaving habits, and whether I “tan mildly/burn moderately” or “tan moderately/burn easily.” These were important questions. My answers had to be confirmed before the woman could categorize my skin tone with the aid of a chart featuring cartoon faces. Luckily everything checked out.

            
            Standing to close the door, the nurse told me that she had some personal health questions to ask. Under fluorescent lights she asked about sexually transmitted diseases, history of heart troubles, diabetes or epilepsy. After it was established that I had neither a current skin infection nor an opiate addiction she rose and opened the door. “Now,” she said looking back to her script, “What kind of a house would you like to be?”

            
            This was my second market research study. My wife had discovered through friends that there was money to be made as a guinea pig, and although I already worked two jobs it seemed like a good idea. We had a new baby at home and my wife was only able to work part-time. Since we lived in Cincinnati, the home of corporations such as Proctor and Gamble and Sara Lee, we had a good shot for steady work on the side.

            
            The idea of being paid for our impressions was initially exciting. It afforded my wife and I the ability to think of our opinions as having more importance that those of our neighbors. The reality of the studies, however, was far from glamorous.

            
            My first study took place in an office park buffered on all sides by fast food restaurants and auto part stores. After months of trying to get on the right call lists I received a phone interview which asked about my toothbrush and what my dream vacation would be. Fifteen minutes later, I was selected to take part in a study for a prototypical toothbrush which was virtually without bristles.

            
            I sat in the waiting room of my first study imagining myself a newly minted tastemaker. My views would influence the production of toothbrushes across the country, and I would become a commodity like the college graduates I had read about in newsmagazines who were jaunted about on private jets to give market insight on consumer electronics and movie trailers. I dreamed that I had found a way to both make money and do as little as possible, which is the secret hope of American. But as my first study began the dullness of the process became evident.

            
            I sat at a conference table surrounded by stay-at-home mothers and retirees, many of whom remarked how the décor of the waiting room had changed since last month.  We were then given a toothbrush that had a rubber bowl in the middle of it. The woman conducting the conversation told us that we were being video taped, and that the two-way mirrors which took up one wall of the room behind her may or may not hide company officials brought in to view us. After the introductions she handed out a booklet filled with happy faces and frowny faces. The yellow faces were our means of response. I was back in kindergarten, and under observation.

            Over the next three hours the moderator made statements such as “I don’t feel that I am effectively brushing my teeth,” and waited for us to circle a face. Very early on it became clear that we were expected to respond positively regardless of how silly the proclamations might be. If we responded negatively it inevitably led to her looking nervously over her shoulder at the mirrors before asking for clarification.

            When I protested that as an adult I felt perfectly capable of both brushing my teeth and tying my shoes the woman rephrased the prompt. “But don’t you ever wonder if you get it all?” she asked. “Wouldn’t you like your mouth to feel cleaner?” My fellow kindergarteners cleared their throats, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit that I was incapable of brushing my teeth.

            About the time we were asked what we thought the rubber bowl in the middle of the toothbrush’s head was for, it dawned on me that I wouldn’t be asked back for another study. This thought was confirmed when I received my check for sixty dollars from a receptionist who told me that they never call the same subjects back a second time.

            Sixty dollars wasn’t bad for three hours of fiddling with a toothbrush, but my second study was a big score in the world of market research. It paid five hundred dollars. Short of the thousands a person can make allowing medical students to give them a rectal exam it was the best one could hope for.

Station Three

            When I started doing studies the two jobs I worked served to keep my family just above the poverty line. Although I had just received a part-time faculty appointment at a local college, I still had to wait tables six days a week to make ends meet. Each day I went to work at the restaurant I had to remind myself that at least I wasn’t working in a coal mine as my grandfather had, or unloading freight at a rail station as my uncle did. When the nights went well this thought was enough.

            When the nights went bad I was reminded of a grade school teacher who had once warned my class that it didn’t matter to him if we applied ourselves to our studies or not since someone had to serve him his cheeseburgers. On bad nights this thought, coupled with the fact that I had more education then he did, never lost its sting. Education alone had not served as my salvation from menial jobs, and oftentimes on my drive home from the restaurant I wished I was somebody’s cousin— someone rich and important.

 

            
            At the third station of my big score I was given a tote bag and asked to sign for the contents inside it: one razor, two spare blades and a can of shaving cream. The woman who gave it to me was also dressed in hospital scrubs and she smiled sweetly before directing me to the fourth station which she called, “The Control Room.”

            I sat in the hallway, which had the smell of a Thanksgiving dinner mixed with aftershave, and wondered what my wife was doing at this time of day. Like me she had two college degrees, and had once been over one hundred stores in five states. This was before we had our first child. After the baby was born she had to find work part-time on days when her mother could babysit. In the end she found a job merchandizing lawn and garden supplies for the same stores she used to supervise. Early in the morning if she wasn’t lifting bags of mulch that weighed almost as much as she did, she would stack pansies or try to assemble aluminum shelves with sixteen-year-old stock boys. It was a sacrifice, and one she assured me would only last until our little girl was old enough to go to preschool.

Station Four

            The air inside “The Control Room” was kept at a constant sixty-five degrees. Candy-colored lounge chairs circled the walls and a folding table was stacked high with outdated copies of Maxim and Time. In the corner of the room a balding obese man sat on a doctor’s stool surrounded by important looking monitors. When I entered he motioned for me and handed me a timer with a sigh.

            Sitting on an orange leather recliner surrounded by other men who drowsily thumbed through pages featuring bikini-clad reality television stars, I watched the timer count down in my hand. The pallid technician slumped defeated in the middle of his computer fort, and I suddenly felt as if I had stumbled into a Kubrick movie. The cold air and the institutional lights only added to this feeling, as did the fact that my bag was marked with a tag which read “Subject Seventy Two.”  This was the name I would be known by for the next month.

            I was all but asleep by the time by timer went off. “Subject Seventy Two,” the man said flatly as he waved his thick hand for me to join him. I was directed to sit on a chair in front of him and look to my left. As I did he held up a spotlight to my face then copied the numbers from the monitor onto a green chart. The same routine was carried out on the right side of my face. I have no idea what he measured; the number of my pores, the redness of my skin. Regardless, when he finished I was given a folder and directed to the fifth station as another man’s timer went off behind me.

Station Five

            My wife and I had tried a number of ways to make extra money before stumbling upon market research. She had sold old clothes and antique greeting cards on Ebay for a while but with limited success, as her selling was never able to keep up with my passing obsession for vintage paperbacks. I had tried to explain to her the importance of owning an original copy of the novelization of the film version of “Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band” which featured the Bee Gees on the cover, but it was a lost cause. Eventually we both fell out of love with online auctions and had to find other ways to supplement our income.

            I had suggested online poker but the idea was shot down immediately. She had suggested babysitting for our neighbors, but we were unsure of the state regulations regarding childcare and neither of us wanted to take a chance on a lawsuit should a child in our care break an arm or have some other equally actionable accident. In the end being guinea pigs was our best hope.

            The fifth station was only a folding table with the smiley face charts I remembered from my toothbrush study. Another nurse asked me to rate my feelings about my shaving habits by circling one face or the other in response to the questions. When I finished with the chart it was put in a folder marked with my number, and I was escorted to a reclining dentist’s chair flanked by two more nurses.

            Once I lay on the chair the women were reassuring. “You’re almost done today,” one said with a smile while the other put metal prongs against my cheek which looked like a tuning fork. On the bed I watched two sets of red lines inch up the screen of a monitor while numbers at the bottom spun through percentages. The results for both sides of my face were catalogued and added to my chart. When the metal prongs had finished with me I was handed my tote bag by one of the nurses and led to the sixth station. Outside the rain continued to fall.

Station Six

            Waiting in the hall to enter the sixth station, I felt sorry for my wife. At her past job she had worked from home most all the time and had a travel allowance for when she had to drive. Now she was left to lift bags of manure and taste-test microwavable lasagna when given the chance just to make do. But she had time with our daughter and that was more important to her than anything else. Our baby had been picked for diaper studies which ended up being a Godsend, although it meant in a small way our daughter was already working beneath her potential. As for myself, I only wished I had been able to convince my wife that I was one hell of a poker player.

            A nurse draped a black robe around my neck at “Station Six” and led me into a dark room where my head was placed on a metal brace facing a camera. Then she worked a bite-guard in my mouth. This was to ensure that the photographs were consistent throughout the course of the study, and process promised cramps and back spasms. The camera flashed me blind on the first shot so all those following lost their sting.

            When the photo session was finished I had to be helped off the stool as both my sense of direction and balance had gone.

Station Seven

            The nurse at the seventh station reminded me that should I show up with a suntan I would be immediately disqualified. Behind her a fall storm beat against the window. She then handed me a form which asked for my family income and occupation. This was for the purpose of quotas she assured me. I wrote “professor” down on the occupation line and for the first time one of the people administering the study showed some degree of personal interest in me as a subject.

            “What do you teach?” The nurse asked.

            “English,” I responded.

 
            “Oh,” she replied. “My degree is in accounting.”

            The women who had been studying me for the last two hours, the man with the spotlight in the cold room, the voice over the phone, were not nurses. This raised hosts of questions and concerns and in that moment, and a little too late, I felt like a sucker. I had related my medical history to them just as if I was in a doctor’s office. I had filled in every legally identifying detail of my life on their forms. I had allowed machines I didn’t recognize to take measurements I didn’t understand by people wearing costumes.

            I considered walking out, but slowly realized that these people who surrounded me, the ones who had to come in before sunrise and discuss beard growth with haggard strangers, were in the same boat I was. None of them interviewed their little friends with scripts when they were children. None of them had hoped to go to their dream college where they would study head braces and suntan recognition. At that moment if a bomb dropped from the heavens above and leveled the strip mall research clinic and all those gathered inside of it none of us would have died doing what we loved. We were making the best of the hands we had been dealt in life, and hoping that in a few years we would be on a better footing. For now, unspoken, we agreed to make the best of it.

Station Eight

            At the eighth station the products in my tote bag were weighed on an electric scale by another non-nurse and I was told that this would be done at every visit hereafter to judge the amount of product I used. Other conditions were rattled off in a monotone, but I was too tired to reply with more than a nod. Inside I wondered if this was a psychological study, if all the apparatus and costumes were meant not to gauge the closeness of my shave but solely my resolve to participate. The answer to this question is another result I will never know.

            Driving home in the morning rain, I read through all I had agreed to when stopped at traffic lights. While most of the conditions seemed mundane, one stood out. The wording of it was to the effect that anything creative or inventive work that might result from the study I participated in would be the sole property of the unnamed client sponsoring the study through perpetuity.

            My first visit was over. In three more weeks the unknown company would have no claim on my time, but the words I write now are, at least in a legal sense, their intellectual property forever. I can only hope that an unknown company is far too busy to hustle non-nurses into a future courtroom to testify against a subject who is solely identified as “Subject Seventy Two.” I have to hope they have more meaningful ways to fill their time.