I was alone, watching a movie at the start of freshman year, when the phone rang. The ordinary impulse would've been to pause Reservoir Dogs"" and answer it, but this was the room phone, which I had not come to think of as my own in the few days living with it.
The first dozen times I had picked up the phone, I wound up talking to my roommate's mother, a worried-sounding woman calling from northern China.
""Wei?""
She spoke no more English than I spoke Mandarin and, unless her son was around to take the call, our conversations drew on tediously, as we both tried to break down our language barrier through sheer force of will. Still, I felt bad just hanging up immediately, and so their phone bill continued to rack up international charges while we each played our part in this frustrating ritual.
If the phone rang in the morning, it was usually a telemarketer.
""Fuck you,"" my roommate would inform them, later quizzing me for additional obscenities that could be shouted into the receiver whenever he was roused by a call.
At the moment, it was after business hours in the Midwest, and the sun would've only just risen in Fushun, so I decided to take a chance:
""Hi, I'm _______, a student at the UW Medical School. We're conducting a survey on health and campus life and we're looking to get student responses to a list of general questions. Do you have a few minutes?""
The survey began like the questionnaires passed around by lazy students for their 12th-grade sociology projects, covering drinking habits, smoker or non-smoker, how often did I exercise and so forth. Things then shifted, imperceptibly, off the rails.
On an average day, a question about the prevalence of body hair around one's nipples might be a cause for concern. Placed as it was - after questions about the prevalence of body hair on my arms, legs, back, shoulders and chest, but before questions about hair on my posterior, abdomen and groin - the inquiry seemed not just appropriate and logical, but necessary. ""Why wouldn't someone want to know that?"" I thought.
Neither these nor the anatomical questions which followed were the sort of thing I'd ever been asked by a doctor, even in the middle of a physical, but we were compensating for the fact that my interviewer was talking to me on the phone rather than observing me in a clinical setting. For all I knew, my physician back home had been compiling detailed data on the tautness of my calves and my general skin tone since the first grade. She had simply never had to ask about it.
After I answered the last question, the med student thanked me for my cooperation, and I wished him luck on his research, happy to have done my part. I finished the movie and noticed a new e-mail. It was a campus-wide warning letter from the university, and my eyes darted back and forth between ""... persons impersonating med students ..."" and ""... asking inappropriate personal questions"" until they cramped.
I had just answered said personal questions with a level of detail that I had considered helpful. I now faced the realization that my caller had considered these details either humorous or pornographic. It was the first lesson the university had taught me about guarding personal information, but far from the last.
Forget to log out of your online profile and someone might seize the opportunity to swap your picture for a glorified portrait of Adolf Hitler. Agree to help a med student and you might become an unwitting party to deviant sexual behavior.
In another year, I'll be sitting across the desk from a potential employer, tight-lipped and defiant.
They'll want to know what I studied in school, what I consider to be my biggest assets. I'll reply that there's no way I'm going to talk, that they'll have to
torture me first.
""Torture you?"" he'll muse, stubbing out a cigarette and looking off thoughtfully. ""That... that's a good idea. I like that.""
How about a little fire, Scarecrow? E-mail Matt at hunziker@wisc.edu.
