Our big adventure

My friend and I recently put our hands up to join in on a project that involved travelling to another part of the country for a night and interviewing a doctor. Pretty simple stuff. Our accommodation, petrol, and food is paid for, and once we have the interview out of the way we can spend the rest of our time here chilling out and exploring.

So here we are, living it up in New Plymouth. Well, as much as you can live it up in New Plymouth anyway.

I woke up at quarter to six this morning to make it from Tauranga to Hamilton in time to leave Hamilton for New Plymouth at 7.30. Sacha and I left the house at 7.40, and ended up turning around three times to get something from home. The first time Sacha realised she’d forgotten her laptop. The second time we figured out that neither one of us had brought the important piece of paper telling us about what we were interviewing the doctor about. The third time we decided we wanted to get the cassette thing that lets me plug my ipod into the car. By this point we realised we were actually running well on time and could afford to turn back one more time.

When we reached the hospital we got a little lost, but everything went well once we found our guy. After the interview we set off in search of our hotel.

Now, as we reached the hotel, I started to get a deep feeling of dread in my stomach. It looked like a dump. We pulled into the hotel carpark and I thought to myself “this is the place where dreams go to die”. There was a strong possibility, in my mind, that we would get murdered or abducted as we walked from the carpark to the hotel reception.

When we went inside, I breathed a sigh of relief. It was nice. It looked classy. We survived the treacherous trek from the car.

So as it turns out, the place isn’t half bad, and we did not, in fact, choose a dud. That being said, here’s the view from our room’s window.

The voice of the people

I had to do a vox pops today. If I haven’t mentioned it before, for those of you who don’t know what a vox pops is, it’s short for vox populi, and is one of those things where a reporter goes out into the street and hunts down a handful of people, asks them all the same couple of questions, and takes a photo. They post the photo up with a quote underneath, and in total you usually have around five or so people.

Today I had to talk to children. A new frontier to cross.

The questions were about their favourite good guy from all the books, movies and TV shows they’d seen, and then who they thought was the worst bad guy.

Kids are quite difficult to get answers out of, it turns out. This one gorgeous little boy named James shook his head when his Dad asked him if he wanted to be interviewed, but once his Dad started asking him about his favourite heroes he started chatting happily away. I took a photo of him (he even said ‘cheese’ for me), and when I left he waved goodbye.

The second child I spoke to was a little girl, and when I started taking her photo, her two little brothers decided they wanted to get in on the action, and jumped into the shot as well.

Now,  here’s the awkward thing. Apparently doing a vox pops doesn’t warrant me getting sent out with a photographer, or even a camera for that matter. I did bring my digital camera with me to Wellington, but being the bright little cookie that I am, I left the memory card back in Hamilton. My boss didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with me using my cellphone to take photos, so that’s what I did, as unprofessional as it felt.

The last lady whose children I spoke to evidently thought the same thing, because when I pulled my phone out and started taking headshots, she began to question whether or not I had any ID on my to prove I was from Fairfax, like I’d said. I had to explain that no, I was only on a short internship so I had no ID, but if she was uncomfortable I wouldn’t interview her children.

“Oh, well, I suppose you’re fully clothed,” she said.

So that was that.

When I went back to the office, though, my boss said I’d received a little praise from someone from the Dom post, who asked if I could do a vox pops tomorrow, because I was good at it.

Inside my mind, I did a victory dance. Outwardly, I contented myself with spinning around on my chair a few times in celebration.

Name dropping and politician hunting

My classmate and I went on a Prime Minister hunt today at Fieldays, and scored an interview with him.

We’d heard he’d be showing up at ten, so we tried to find him. Eventually we ended up at the National party stall, and found ourselves shaking hands with David Bennet, who assured us the Prime Minister was not at Fieldays, and wouldn’t be showing up until somewhere between one and two. Disappointing. Disheartened, we left the building, bumping into a Waikato Times reporter that used to go to Wintec, who informed us that John Key most certainly was here, and would be coming around the corner any moment.

Sure enough, what she said was true, and minutes later there he was, moving at a snail’s pace through the mob of people who wanted him to take photos with their children. Feeling like idiots, my friend and I jumped in to shake his hand and get ourselves a photo too. But that wasn’t our reason for being there. The reason was to score an interview. We didn’t manage it after our photo, so we followed along in the sea of people as he made his way into the pavilion.

He walked up to David Bennet and stood chatting, shaking hands with people and taking more photos with children. Bennet, noticing us standing there awkwardly, beckoned us forward, telling Key that we had some questions to ask him.

I used the opportunity while my friend got his recorder out to shamelessly name drop.

“Do you know Ian Wishart?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I’m his daughter.”

“Oh! You’re in my electorate!”

“No, I live in Hamilton.”

Awkwardness ensued. Then my friend started his interview. I butt in once to ask a question that I was relatively proud about, and before long we’d run out of things to say. The end. Ta dah.

The two of us shook his hand again, and Nathan Guy, the minister for primary industries, who took it upon himself to join in on the interview. Then we were off, back to our Wintec site, feeling a little bit chuffed, and, on my friend’s part, a little bit like wanting to vomit.

As we left, his press secretary chased us down, telling us that for future reference, if we wanted to talk to John Key, we needed to go through them.

“Oh, yep,” I said out loud.

‘Screw that,’ I muttered in my head.

Feeling pretty good right now.

A little common courtesy

I work part time at a market research company. That immediately puts me in the decidedly un-elite list of generally hated people.

Sure, sure, I get it, you’re tired and grouchy, you just came home from work and want to relax for a moment. You’re pondering whether or not to start cooking dinner, but while you’re still mulling it over, the phone rings.

“Hi, my name’s Melissa from -” You hang up.

People actually do that. They can tell just by the tone of my voice and the way I introduce myself, even before I say where I’m from. They know what I am. 

So yeah, I get it. The last thing you want to do is a phone survey about how the customer service was the last time you called your insurance company. The thing that I don’t get is why people have to be so damn rude about it.

I’m a tertiary student. I’m poor. Market research is the only job I can have that will be flexible around class hours, as well as let me have weekends off to see my boyfriend, who lives in another city. The only shifts I can work are 5.30 to 8.30, the exact time when people don’t want to be called.

I am absolutely not sorry for disturbing anyone’s evening with a simple phone call, because when it comes down to getting in the way slightly of somebody’s relaxation time or being able to afford warmer clothes for Winter or maybe a pair of shoes without holes in them, I know that my situation takes precedence.

I had a man today who agreed to do the survey. I told him it was about ten minutes, depending on his answers, and I told him that it was about the customer service he received when he called a certain organisation which I won’t name. It wasn’t even as if I bullied him into doing it, he just said “go ahead” and that was that.

But after a few minutes he was sighing and grumbling, and after another couple of minutes he was saying under his breath “this is getting ridiculous”. About three quarters of the way through he was telling me, quite irritably, to hurry up already, and that he didn’t know why I was asking him ridiculous questions about something that happened a month ago. Knowing that I’d get in trouble if I skipped anything, I plowed steadily on, finally reaching the end of the survey and asking him if he’d like a number to call in case he had any questions about the survey.

“No I don’t want the number, I couldn’t give a stuff about it, this is ridiculous,” he fumed.

“Thankyou for doing the survey,” I said cheerily.

“This is ridiculous,” he repeated, “I won’t be doing this ever again.”

I don’t know if that old geezer didn’t realise that I don’t write the surveys, but it’s about time people wrap their heads around it. What’s more, he knew exactly what the survey was going to be about, he knew exactly how long it would take, and he had the option, at any point, to say to me that he’d rather not continue with the survey. Yet instead he sat there bemoaning the types of questions and the “tediousness” of it, and continuously told me to hurry up. I’m bewildered as to why he ever agreed to do the survey if he was going to throw such a tantrum about it halfway through.

People like that make this job more mentally taxing than it needs to be. People like that make me lose just a little faith in humanity, because if they’re this disrespectful to a stranger on the phone, then what kind of values are they teaching to others? To their children? To their grandchildren?

I once called a house and got a youngish-sounding girl, who then went to get a parent for me to talk to.

“Who is it?” I heard the parent ask.

“It’s one of those people you get to be rude to!” The girl replied excitedly.

Yeah. Hurrah. Fun times.

I think what I’m trying to say is that market researchers are people too. Just because we annoy you doesn’t mean we don’t deserve to be treated with the same amount of respect as any other person. That goes for everybody. Maybe the Mormons showing up at your front door or the telemarketer trying to sell you things over the phone. Everybody deserves to be treated with respect. Just because we annoy you doesn’t mean we are suddenly the scum beneath your feet.

I’m ready for a change.

Journos unleashed

What a day.

The North Island hosts a national secondary schools rowing competition every year called the Maadi Cup (technically the Maadi Regatta, but that’s a battle for another day), and it’s held at Lake Karapiro.

As a class full of budding young journalists, our tutors are taking us out to Karapiro nearly every day this week to hunt down stories, interview people, and publish them to our news website, The Waikato Independent.

I went today, with a small group from the class. The whole class has to go tomorrow, but we decided to go today. Get in early and whatnot.

I’m glad I went today. Sure, we were timid little things, wandering around in our fluorescent jackets until we decided we looked like dorks and took them off. And sure, we spent a fair amount of time standing in a group looking exactly like the timid dorks we suspected we were.  But I had a great time.

I met Mahe Drysdale, an Olympic gold medalist, and got his autograph. He is a very tall man.

I got lost trying to find a man I’d arranged to interview. He was very understanding though, and the interview went well.

And I had fun, got to know my classmates even better, and got to sit in a leather chair, swivel around and say “I’ve been expecting you.”

It’s been good.