Drinking and Drawing

next week, ideo will be coming to my house to interview me about pens and pencils that i like. this is something i am, perhaps surprisingly, passionate about. sometime after high school i began a quasi-epic journey in search of the perfect pen and notepad-- something that would draw fine lines in true black with a minimal bleed, and a sturdy blank-paged pad that could fit in an chest pocket.

for a while i was using an extra fine pilot pen (the jerk in the drawing above), and making due with a large pad of yellow legal paper. but the pen bled and the pad was too big.

i don't know how many pens and pads i went through, but i ultimately ended up choosing the micron 005 and storyboard-style moleskine.

only to move to san francisco and discover that literally every illustrator used microns and ever form of artist-- illustrator or not-- used some type of moleskine.

for once, i would've saved time had i just done what everyone else was already doing.

anyway, ideo will be here with a camera, $250 in cash, and 90 minutes worth of pen-related questions.

this is actually the second topic of passion i've discussed with ideo over the years. once, in 2008, they came to beau's house to interview us about alcohol. we went through our "timeline of alcohol" and touched on our first drinks as well as what we thought we would be drinking in the future. at the time, beau and i were on a serious sailor jerry kick and so we had a lot to say about rum. i was still a whiskey drinker, but most of my worst jobs and relationships hadn't happened yet and i wasn't nearly as clingy to whiskey as i am now.

most of the interview, though, was a sort of improv game. they gave us a stack of playing cards with pictures of known liquors-- smirnoff, patron, and the like. our job was to put personalities to the bottles and have them all engage in a party as they would in our imagination.

"captain morgan is a bro-- he's a douche and a bro-- and he's hitting on everyone, thinks he's the life of the party. smirnoff is off in the corner puking away cuz she's got no tolerance but drinks a shitload anyway, and belvedere is sitting by herself writing elitist poetry and ignoring everyone."

"but you know, at the end of the night captain morgan is gonna take belvedere home and she's not gonna tell anyone about it. except bicardi gold's gonna see, and man, she's gonna tell everyone."

"well, she's just jealous because she had that bad break up with captain..."

turned out the study was paid for by bicardi.

i think that may have been beau's first experience with focus groups-- which at the time, i was living off of entirely and advertised for avidly-- and in the end we were given $150 each and an extra $50 to go to a hemlock and drink on camera.

about a month later, they called the two of us back for another interview-- this time at their offices over at pier 28-- to discuss new products for alcoholics. a lot of them were gimmicky and useless, but the hour-long interview earned us another $200 and a free dinner.

you have to understand the average focus group writes you a check for about $75-$125 for an hour of opinion and usually requires you to visit their office with a group of strangers. ideo tends to come to your house and pays you not only in cash, but almost double what any other research group pays.

needless to say, i'm psyched to be meeting with these fools again.

p.s. if anyone is looking for free money via focus groups and market research, i am more than willing to have coffee and a thirty minute conversation on exactly how to sneak into studies that you don't qualify for. if you live in a city, there is virtually no excuse for being broke and i'd love to open the focus group doors for anyone who hasn't figured it out themselves.

or, you know, do whatever you want and i'll just take the hundreds of dollars and talk about fine-tipped microns with strangers.