We were stopped near the entrance by a frazzled woman.
“Please, I need four more surveys filled out by 6:00 – would you PLEASE take a survey about snack crackers? You would get a $10 gift card?”
“What type of crackers?” I haggled.
“Cheez-Its™.”
“I LOVE Cheez-Its™! I ‘ll take that survey for free.”
“Great,” she beamed, and led my daughter and me off to an office space in the Mall. I promised my daughter that it wouldn’t take long. She looked more amused than annoyed.
I was passed off to a woman in a darkened room, I was asked to sit in what looked like a dentist’s chair, cushy and high backed.
“Now, don’t move your head,” I was told sternly, “Just move your eyes to the number I say.”
Numbers appeared on the screen and I was told to look at a varying array of numbers. I was scolded every so often, “Look at the NUMBER, not your daughter! Three! Five! No, now look with just your eyes….Three!”
I was really trying to look through my nose but that wasn’t working, I could sense my daughter holding in laughs as her mother was hounded to scan numbers. I was starting to think I wanted the ten bucks…
After a good five minutes of scanning and scolding, we were moved to a room with a wall-sized mural of a grocery store’s snack aisle.
“Can you find the Cheez-Its™?” Duh, right there. I was amazed at how quickly my eye picked out the red boxes.
Then I sat down and was shown pictures of snack boxes. Then the woman testing me got an earful.
“I like the little Cheez-It™ used as a hyphen….I like the more realistic version better.” As I looked through copies of different sample boxes, I expounded, “Now this is just a bad design…what are these things supposed to be? Pretzels? They look like a cartoon grub. I don’t think that is what you are looking for on a snack box…”
I felt I had verbally given back after my visual difficulties. Feeling vaguely smug I pocketed the ten bucks and used them to pay for my daughter’s mouth guard.
The next week, turning a corner at the grocery store, I was dismayed, however, to realize how quickly my eye spotted the Cheez-It™ area. “Scan to number three,” indeed.