I have a part-time job transcribing interviews and focus groups. The audio files are on a variety of subjects, anything from interviewing obviously annoyed (I can hear it in their voices) shoppers about their feelings on microwavable rice dinners to a focus group with a bunch of urologists discussing the latest treatment pathways for prostate cancer. (that one was actually pretty interesting)
Today, I had about 20-30 short files which were excerpts from an interview with a woman with lung cancer which was focused on how she managed her life around a rigorous treatment schedule. I'm guessing the interviewer was a pharmaceutical representative of some sort because they spent a long time talking about her different pills and how she stores them, refills them, schedules them, etc.
Anyway, during the last few files, the interviewer, completely out of left field, asked a question which literally stunned me with how inappropriate and in bad taste it was. The interviewer had a pretty neutral tone throughout the whole thing, responding to "I have trouble opening this box" and "I have terminal lung cancer and live alone" with the exact same tone of polite sympathy. That I can understand - the interviewer is probably doing like 30 of these. But then she asked this question, and SHIT. This woman, the interviewer, could teach this guy a thing or two about dealing with sensitive topics with a delicacy usually reserved for prison rape:
(this image taken from Cracked.com's recent article, "25 Awesome Ways to Break Bad News - check it out)
Let me give you a little background on the woman being interviewed: Parents both dead, husband of 37 years dead. Ran a day care center out of her house for 15 years while taking care of her mother, who had Alzheimer’s. Worked nights as Wal-Mart for 10 years. Lives alone, and has been diagnosed with Stage IIIB Non-small cell lung cancer, which puts her pretty squarely in the "When, not If" box.
I know I'm taking a little while to get to the point, but the background is essential. It's important to know how pleasant and nice this woman is despite being in an objectively shitty situation. I mean, she's a baller - check out these quotes:
(On working nights at Wal-Mart for 10 years) "That’s one of the things about my job – not only were there a lot of people, but we had the strangest people that would come in the middle of the night. I can’t begin to describe it."
(After being asked yet another boring question about her pills) "I forget. I just – there is a thing called chemo brain – you forget things."
(On eschewing pain medication) "I would take the morphine and I would just go to sleep – I’m not going to spend the rest of my life going to sleep."
She even makes a joke at the moderator's expense that I'm pretty went right over her head:
Woman: When I went to Doctor Goldberg, he put me in because he wanted to run different tests, and I was in there – unfortunately I came down with MRSA. I was a little while in there.
Moderator: What does MRSA look like?
Woman: It doesn’t “look”; it’s an infection. I had it on my leg. It looks like bubbles. (She's right)
Then their conversation moves towards her general emotional state. She starts dropping knowledge bombs aplenty, and the interviewer doesn't even appreciate it:
Moderator: Do you go to any support groups?
Woman: I did. But to be very honest with you, walking into a room full of people that are much worse than I am physically – I mean, even when I was bald and really sick – you know, you don’t look at yourself that way. They were talking about death and dying, and I want to talk about living. I don’t want to talk about planning my funeral.
She even lays down some heavy shit, and the interviewer just plows on through without missing a beat:
Moderator: Before you got this diagnosis, you were just taking two pills. When you do your Wednesday routine, when you get everything out, how do you feel when you look at all this?
Woman: I don’t think about it anymore. I used to. I used to think, “If I take this whole bottle, I won’t have to worry about anything anymore.” But I don’t think about it anymore.
Moderator: What helped you to get past that?
Woman: I don’t know. I wouldn’t want my children to find me, knowing I didn’t fight.
Damn straight - I mean some of that definitely sounds cheesy when I type it up, sure, but I'm just recording what happened. So they're going through all this stuff, and then, it happened. The moderator drops this bomb, which I quote verbatim:
"If I were to ask – and this is kind of a hard question – what character you would use to describe lung cancer? What kind of a character, a cartoon character, something like that – anything come to mind?"
WHAT. THE. FUCK. That's not a hard question, that's a FUCKING HORRIBLE question. Worse, it's almost funny. There could easily be an SNL skit about this. I already came up with two in my head. But given the context, it was not funny AT ALL. Even beyond the fact that the question is insensitive and borderline retarded, what exactly is it supposed to accomplish? What does an answer, any answer, get you? When I heard this on my headphones, I took my hands off the keyboard and scooted away from the computer in a reflexive move I would characterize as "extreme distaste".
The worst thing was that the woman didn't do what I would have done, which is kick the interviewer directly out of my house. Instead, there was a long, long pause, and then she said, in a very small voice:
"Pac-Man."
The moderator, oblivious to the inherent sadness and cruelty of the situation, blithely asks a follow-up: "What about Pac-Mac?"
Another long pause. Finally, she answers: "It just keeps eating away."
Well done, moderator. You know, it's really strange to find myself on the other side of this, but there is a place in this world for decency and tact. And this woman fucking deserved some. I wanted to grab that interviewer and shake her, hopefully rattling back into alignment whatever fucked-up part of her brain thought that was an appropriate question. Hey girl, you see anything wrong with the following picture? No? Didn't think so.
1 comment:
While I'm not defending the question, it was probably intended to help their marketing/advertising branch decide, if they ever were to run an ad in which lung cancer were to be anthropomorphized, what sort of character they would use.
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