Something I’m Good At: Holiday Surprise! Edition
Just when I thought I had plumbed the depths (I mean, between 41 and 46 items, some of which are admittedly kind of the same as other items, that’s gotta be eye-to-eye with the bottom of my talent-barrel) of things I’m good at, my friend Sarah pointed out another one! A somewhat pitiful one, in context, but a talent nonetheless:
- I’m good at having opinions on things I have no business having AN opinion on, much less MANY opinions, such that businesses will pay me to sit around and dominate conversations with my MANY IMPORTANT NEWLY FORMED opinions.
I can muster up a strongly worded opinion of at least a sentence or two on just about any topic, and this, almost alone among my many semi-useless talents, has actually managed to make me money. I can care about anything, with some time and a little background information, even things I don’t even particularly like. Do I play video games? Sure! (I was epic at “Street Fighter II” when I was 10, so that counts.) Do I play games on my phone? Absolutely, sometimes! (There was that lost week when I got a new phone and downloaded this Scrabble-y type game that I REFUSED TO LOSE until finally I realized I was headed for a Scrabble-y nervous breakdown and deleted it, so yes, I play games on my phone. Certainly in the general, span-of-my-lifetime sense.) Would I like to come and sit in a little room on a cellphone, flinging pirate rats and Russian (they could have been from some other Soviet-bloc nation, it was unspecified) penguins and stating my STRONGLY WORDED OPINIONS on the two games, in exchange for a Diet Coke and $55? You had me at Diet Coke, as long as it’s cold.
I get a lot of online surveys - I think I must be in a really sought-after demographic. Apparently people who are apparently very much like me buy a LOT of stuff, from paper towels to snack chips to headache medicine, which is funny because everyone I know who’s in my demographic also lives in a tiny city apartment with no space to buy lots and lots of stuff. But they want my opinion anyway, and my opinion they shall have. I end up with a good number of online surveys for liquor brands, which are usually awful because I have to spend an unbelievable amount of time indicating what kind of person, say, Smirnoff Raspberry Vodka would be, if silly flavored vodkas could turn into Real People, sort of like Pinocchio if you could mix Pinocchio into a delicious cosmopolitan. These ones are tough to muster up opinions for - is Smirnoff Raspberry Vodka “personable”? I did get one pretty awesome in-person focus group, for a brand of popular rum’s new marketing campaign. I never would have known it, but apparently I care deeply about this rum’s brand presentation; the next time you enjoy a particularly sassy ad for rum, please feel free to thank me. I think I got $100 for sharing my pushy, pushy opinions with a bunch of demographically-identical-except-much-cooler-than-me women for an hour or two, but the real jackpot was yet to come. The sweet marketing girl (they’re always about 24, very tired, and very, very sweet) announced that she had a flight to St. Louis in the morning, and damn that TSA, she wouldn’t be able to take all these comparison bottles of every brand of brown liquor known to man on the plane! So why didn’t we girls just help ourselves?
For a second it was like a Mexican stand-off, with all of us frozen in place, staring across the room. Then it was more like a Chinese fire drill, as 10 formerly composed 25- to 30-year-olds with professional jobs and plenty of friends and a propensity for cool bars started to dash around the table, trying to take what they could grab without appearing to be desperate to get their well-manicured mitts on that bottle of Sailor Jerry. The group left clanking. I still have a bottle of Captain Morgan’s in my liquor cabinet that I didn’t even want but couldn’t bear to leave all alone on the table when the dust had settled. The whole scene was, in an overused word, awesome, and we didn’t have to buy liquor for parties for a good little while.
I don’t really have a point with this (NOT something I am good at), but if a focus group company asks if you like to drink, and especially if they ask if you totally talk about quality beverages with your many fun popular influential young-person friends who ask your opinion about quality beverage-related purchases all the time, you say yes. Then just make sure you have lots of opinions.
December 18th, 2010 at 11:59
I was in a drinking survey once! It was awesome. I got $40, got to drink four rum and cokes with a sandwich break in between, and my brother got $10 for being my designated driver.