CLEAR
CLEAR
I was eating cocoanut flavored gelato
outside at night when a small mousy
brown haired girl sat next to me and asked
me if I would like to take a free personality test
which she was passing out to help promote her religion.
The evening was early still
so I accepted and she stepped away for a moment
and returned with a pen, and salmon colored two page pamphlet.
The pamphlet had two hundred questions on it
the answers to which were all either “yes” “no” or “maybe”
She instructed me that I was to answer the questions quickly,
and without thinking about any one question for too long.
“Also,” she said “If you don’t know the answer to a question
just put “maybe.”
“Well that doesn’t seem right,” I said, “Why would I put “maybe” to a question
I didn’t know the answer to?”
“That’s just how it works” she said.
“Well, it’s your test I guess…”
And so I sat, pen to pad, nibbling my gelato
and trying to move quickly through
a two hundred question test.
Much like most personality tests,
or really any open ended tests I have ever taken
the questions were arranged in the most confusing
and annoying way possible so as to easily weed out the failures right off.
The goal is to frustrate them until they snap by taking a question like-
“Are you unhappy?”
and changing it into-
“Do you often feel you are rarely happy?”
If you are emotionally or psychologically unstable
you will not be able to make it through more than ten of these questions.
It’s impossible.
If you do make it past this round though,
you will no doubt notice a pattern developing
wherein each tenth question is another variation
on a question you have already answered, like-
“Do you rarely feel you are often happy?”
This will make you feel as if they are trying to trick you
the same way standardized job applications try and trick you
by asking you if you have ever shoplifted or the way a cop tries to trick you by asking if you’ve been drinking.
The more these questions appear the more you will think to yourself
“No, I promise, I answered it already. Stop it.”
As I finished the test I was taken upstairs
and sat in a lobby watching a dvd in which fairly bad actors
talked about the merits of self-exploration.
“How much do these actors make?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said the mousy brown haired girl as she handed the test to another slightly older girl who disappeared into an office to process the results.
“So, are you an artist?”
The mousy brown haired girl asked, after a moment of waiting.
“Not really,” I said.
“Well I noticed under occupation you just put “Awesome.”
“Yeah. That’s right.” I said.
After a short while the other girl returned with the test.
Some of the answers I had left blank had been circled with a red marker.
“You have to answer all of them or the test won’t work.”
“But I don’t know what those ones mean.” I said.
“Just put “maybe.” They suggested in unison.
“Are you sure? I think “maybe” means something different than “I don’t know what that means.”
And I read aloud the following question:
“Do you feel that the current prisons-without-bars system is doomed?”
“What is the prisons-without-bars system?” I asked.
“We can’t tell you.”
“Because you don’t know?”
“No, that’s just how the test works, each time you take it you grow. If we told you it would change the outcome.”
“But doomed is a pretty strong word. I don’t want to say something is “maybe doomed.”
No response.
“So should I just put “maybe?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” I said skeptically.
It’s weird, doing something you know is incorrect just because you’d rather not argue and would also like to be able to leave soon. I think this is how most young poor people end up confessing to crime they did not commit-
“What’s involuntary manslaughter?”
“Just put “maybe,” son.”
So I answered “maybe” to six other questions and the test was sent back and soon
a young guy with a happy young face came out and shook my hand and took me back into
his office with framed inspirational quotes
and talked to me about my results.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” he said.
“You did really well.”
And across the table he slid a graph indicating the peaks and valleys
of how the answers should go.
Strangely, mine was one constant peak.
Like a child’s drawing of a personality mountain.
He asked me if I was happy, if I had told the truth on the test
and if I was having any problems he should know about or could help me with.
“No. Not really.” I said.
Then he asked me other questions about where I was from
and what I knew about his religion and I answered truthfully
and each response I gave he said “great” or “perfect” or “wow”
in a way that made me feel like he was trying to pick me up
at a bar, not listening to any of it.
He asked if I had any goals
and I told him I’d like to learn how to do a backflip
and also I would like to have a threesome.
And he asked me what I did all day
and I told him, and it took so long that I think he stopped listening
and at the end he just looked at me
blankly for a minute
confused.
“Well,” he said “I’m going to be straight with you,
it’s not often people come in here and seem so put together but I think you’ve really got a good thing going.”
Then he talked about how his religion wasn’t just designed for people in trouble, but also for those who excel, to help them excel further. He asked if I would like to buy a book and I told him I would probably just borrow a book if I needed it
but that I had just gotten a copy of a biography on NWA’s Ruthless Records and I was going to have to read that first.
Then he shook my hand and asked what I was going to do with the rest of my night.
I told him I was going swimming, and again he looked disappointed. My personality was in order, and I was going swimming.
But before I left, I looked down at the paper and remembered-
“I meant to ask, What is the prisons-without-bars system?”
He thought about it for a minute, laughing, then said-
“Um… I… I don’t really know actually. I’ve always wondered that myself, and I’ve taken the test a bunch of times”
“So do you just put “maybe” every time?”
“Yeah.”
“No wonder the system is doomed.” I said.
But he didn’t think it was funny.