Why did they come to study us?

Upset in the Bellender Arms

We had a request from a university recently, they wanted to come and visit with a study group. People in the village reported back that they didn’t give a hoot or were up for it so we accepted the request. I suppose that most of us thought they would be coming to study our shoreline with it’s amazing abundance of wildlife. We told them to come on a wednesday which is the day after the weekly beach plastic derbris removal workshop. You can imagine our surprise when it turned out that they were studying either anthroplogy or neuroscience, they wanted to come and study us. Paqua was particularly cross as he’d put up with that sort of thing for years in his Amazonian basin village and was pretty fed up with it.

Image par HANSUAN FABREGAS de Pixabay

‘I thought I’d got away from that nonsense when I moved here’ he complained. ‘Back in my old village you couldn’t throw a stick without it hitting some bloody anthrologogist, botanist or whatever. They’d turn up in their helicopters, eat food that they had brought, complain about the humidity and mosquitoes, ask people annoying and often absurd questions, nick our local medicinal plants and generally get up everyone’s nose. They’d then head back and make loads of money from our plants or become famous with some arse about face analysis of our lifestyle. I’ve lost track of the number of DNA tests I’ve put up with.’

‘I’m doing the off before the ****’s get here’, he continued lapsing into to some colourful slang.

George was of the opinion that our Pub AI system could handle the interviews and questions. We tested it out but as the AI was dedicated to predicting what you’d order at the bar the answers were a touch too alchool related.

For the most part we were simply confused as to why these people wanted to come and study us. The discussions on the tuesday before the Visit were heated and we had to cover the AI’s microphone as we didn’t want it to pick up some of the words and expressions that were being hurled about. The Pub has one really comfortable chair and we take turns using it. We practice social exclusion to maintain our social integrity so Henriette,who had accepted the invitation, lost her turn in the comfortable chair and was sent to sit at the back of the pub in a badly lit corner.

It was at the moment when we started to resign ourselves to being studied that the two T’s walked in and announced that they had a simple and effective solution. All we had to do was get a group of tourists together and tell them that we had organised a role play game and that their role would be to pretend to be villagers, we would pretend to be tourists. You could have cut the ensuing silence with a blunt butter knife, total genius was our considered opinion on this timely proposition.

Christopher’s complaint that he didn’t have any tourist like clothes to wear was ignored and a scouting group was sent out to round up some willing tourists. Bearing in mind Christopher’s problem the scouts tried to recruit people who were similar sizes to us so we could swap clothes. We all met up in our ecological sustainable launderette because Christopher, who is a bit like that, was worried about cross-contamination of fleas and fungi. None of were sure about which direction he was talking about but better safe than itchy.

Wearing the tourists clothes was very strange for us locals, they attire seemed to be mostly made from plastic fibers, Hi-Tec as one tourist pointed out. Like wearing a tight plastic bag was Henriette’s rely. The tourists on the other hand seemed to enjoy our clothes which are made from locally produced organic hemp, linen, wool and stinging nettle fibers, one or two asked if the clothes swap could be permanent; there was no way that was going to happen we replied.

We set the fake locals up in the pub and the AI explained how everything worked, we locals then set off outside to assume our new roles as fake tourists, something we found surprisingly hard to do. Christopher insisted on speaking with a bizarre hybrid accent that in his mind sounded like a tourist, we did tell him to stop but he wouldn’t. We spotted the researchers arriving over the horizon and we set about pretend to buy things we didn’t need and wandering around aimlessly taking photographs and peering into people’s houses. George seemed to think that a main tourist activity was to go for a pee in a bush and leave some toilet paper to mark the spot. Henriette spent her time picking up shells from the seashore. Led by the two T’s another group set up a picnic on the beach, taking care to get sand into the food. Another group had borrowed some sun screen from a tourist and were lying on towels trying to get their skin to change colour, they were disappointed not to be able to get the glowing red that a few of our visitors manage to achieve so easily. They were also quite impressed by the rainbow hued mini suntan oil slicks they made when swimming.

We had chosen three of our most convincing fake tourists to head to the Pub and check out what was going on. The researchers were very busy and the fake locals seemed to be really enjoying the experience, even when it involved deep nasal swabs and filling in long and tedious questionnaires. The Uni people wandered around with clipboards and tablet computers, they really looked the part and seemed thrilled with the results that they were getting. Their research question was ‘are there notable physical or psychological differences between the villagers and the general population?’ Their results were that there were none, which surprised them. They were finding the same levels of pesticide residues, traces of biphenols, stress levels and general health parameters that they expected to find in the gen pop.

The fake locals were doing a wonderful job and were surprisingly convincing which was great fun as questions like ‘do you only eat organic food?’ seemed to be contradicted by the levels of pesticide traces revealed by test done on their sweat. The poor researchers were tearing their hair out as all their tests produced results that were the opposite of what they expected and seemingly incomprehensible. It was frankly difficult for the fake tourists to keep a straight face. George of course can’t help himself sometimes and thought it would be a right chuckle to persuade the researchers to test him as well. The results stressed the researchers even more as his results showed remarkably low trace levels and psychologically he turned out to be very calm and contented.

In the evening the Pub started to get crowded as we fake tourists got fed up pretending and came in for a drink, the fake locals wouldn’t leave as they were enjoying themselves so much and the researchers were hanging around with wrinkled brows trying to understand their results. Henriette earned her turn back in the comfortable chair by getting the Pub AI to call time and eventually we got our bar back, and our clothes, which was a massive relief. The picnic group were particularly happy to wash the sand out of their mouths with a cool drink, they reported being unconvinced by their gastronomic experience and started singing a song called ‘who put the sand in the sandwiches’ which was inevitable I suppose. The Pub AI told them to shut up demonstrating not only good taste but a new capacity for evolved reasoning.

We were feeling pretty content with ourselves until Paqua wondered in.

‘You did what?’ He asked, astonished. ‘You swapped places and the researchers tested the tourists instead? Are you mad? Are you totally and utterly barking? Do you know what’s going to happen now? You’ve opened the floodgates, they’ll be back in hordes now. Seriously! Who thought this was a good idea? I thought you were people who could think things through and reason a bit. We’re going to be awash with bloody researchers trying to figure out why their results are weird. There’ll be hundreds, no, thousands of them, swarming all over the place prodding and probing, questioning and interrogating. You’ve opened the door to I don’t know how many PhD’s. Really? You couldn’t see that far? I’d exchange all I possess for a brain cell to give you. Life is going to be intolerable, do you actually like having swabs stuck up your noses?

Paqua looked like he was going to rant on for the rest of the evening but fortunately the Pub AI intervened.

‘You forgot to switch my microphone and camera off so I was able to to observe the tests and listen to the questions. I can take over from here no problem, I’ve just hacked into their database and I’ve changed the GPS coordinates, when they come back they’ll end up in the neighboring village'.’

There was a strange quiet in the Pub as people were trying to remember if the AI had an off switch and if there was one did the AI know where it was?