Always the Guinea Pig. Never the Guinea.

Last week, I attended a focus group. I sometimes do these to earn a little extra cash and sleep soundly at night knowing I helped a business find out about its consumers. But mostly it's for the money. Actually, it's all for the money, but at least they're sometimes interesting.

I walked into the research center (i.e. - an old office building with one potted plant decorated with christmas lights from 1972) and sat down alongside 50 other schmoes just trying to make a dolla outta fifteen cents. But, as I so often do, I happened to pick the seat beside the most annoying, socially inept person in the room.

Allow me to explain a conundrum I face on a daily basis. Whenever I am in any sort of social situation alone, the dumbest, freakiest or most homelessiest person within a 5 mile radius must speak to me. I believe I emit some sort of pheromone that attracts life's lowest forms of humanity. Unfortunately, this power I possess only works one way. It doesn't seem to draw in women with no communicable diseases and all their teeth. Hell, I'd feel lucky if it attracted a girl with a dental plan. At least then I'd know there was hope for her orthodontic future.

So I sat down next to a middle-aged woman who looked harmless enough. She's grading papers. "Must be a teacher," I thought. At least her being busy means we wouldn't have to engage in the mindless chatter that so often begins in awkward social situations. But I was wrong. Oh so very wrong.

She begins coughing uncontrollably and I see her face, which looks like the female Gremlin from "Gremlins 2: The New Batch." Yep, she's weird enough. Here comes the conversation. Sure enough, she begins to inform me that I shouldn't worry about her cough. It's not contagious because it's settled far enough in her lungs that it's not going anywhere. I even snapped a picture of her with my camera phone.


Hmm. Thanks for your entire medical history, Gremlette. Here's hoping you also have some sort of strange disease that causes your mouth to stop opening and closing while spewing nonsense about the kids in your class. I don't care if little Billy is gifted unless little Billy will one day go on to create a cure for the common hangover.

Finally, the focus group begins and all 50 of us are ushered into a room. Of course, there is only one seat left, which I am forced to take it. And it just happens to be beside a woman who is so migraine-inducingly annoying, she makes Gremlette look like a fairy-tale, lollipop, bunny hopping, sunshiney day.

The point of the focus group is to have the mediator show us possible new OnDemand cable channels and then we circle on a questionnaire if we'd be interested or not. Don't talk, because it could sway other people's opinions. Don't flip ahead. Just fill out the form and listen. It's so easy, Gremlette's extremely ungifted students could muster the brainpower to complete the simple task at hand.

Yet this woman refuses to shut up. She talks under her breath about how the channel ideas are stupid. About how her kids would never watch that. About how she'd never let her kids watch that. It's actually a wonder that she has kids, because I don't know how or why any man would get her to shut up long enough to impregnate her.

She goes on to yell out things to the moderator about how he's wrong in how he's presenting things to us.

I begin to imagine her husband. He must be a blind, deaf man with no sense of touch. It's the only explanation.

She points to a pencil on the floor at mumbles something at me. I show her my pencil and say, "I've got mine. Thanks." More mumbling about the pencil. I repeat that I have one. She then reaches down and grumbles "It was my pencil. I wanted you to pick it up." Then she lets out a frustrated breath.

My blood actually begins to boil. Steam might have exploded out of my ears as if I was in a Looney Tunes cartoon, but I was so blind with rage that I can't say for sure. I have now decided there is no husband. She was artificially inseminated by Hitler's frozen Nazi-sperm.

A few minutes later, we take a short break and I decide I'll be the better man and let Hitler's baby factory apologize for being so rude. "You know, I couldn't understand what you were saying about the pencil earlier," I say, in my most cordial manner. She responds with "Well I guess if I had to say it over again, I'd talk to you like I talk to my kids so you'd understand."

Now, I would never, ever, under any circumstance even begin to think of hitting a woman, but at this point I'm wondering if strangling one is ok. You know, not enough to kill her or anything. What's a little strangulation between suddenly mortal enemies?

"That is the rudest, most condescending thing I have ever heard in my life." I reply, mostly because if I wasn't trying my damndest to be semi-polite, that whole strangulation thing might have become a reality. But she just ignored it (I presume because "condescending" was a little too polysyllabic for her) and turned around to annoy some other poor soul.

Then, as if the Stupidity Fairy had been flying around the room and sprinkled her with Moron Dust, Gremlette raises her hand and asks if the OnDemand IMAX Channel we're rating is actually going to be in IMAX if she got it at home, because things like that make her nauseous. The moderator seemed shocked that anyone could be that dumb and answered, "Ma'am. Unless you have an IMAX screen in your house, I think you'll be o.k."

At least I can laugh at stupidity. But much like a loaded up chili dog, absolute rudeness doesn't sit so well.

The moral of the story? Just be nice. And if you have to talk to someone you don't know, make sure they actually care to hear what you're talking about. Know when the conversation is over and let it end naturally.

And most importantly, stay away from Nazi-sperm.