The Focus Group
Would you please attend a focus group to discuss the bus and tram network. It'll take an evening, we'll feed you and we'll give you a cheque as a gift.
People so rarely ask you for your opinion these days that the invitation was impossible to refuse.
So I found myself in a group of nine assorted folks discussing real-time information in the bus and tram network of Bordeaux.
Guided by a very cheeky chairman from Paris (what do you call the person who runs a focus group? in French he's an animateur) who got away with saying things he'd never be able to say in the UK, I'm sure, we had a full and lively discussion. Almost everyone uses the smartphone apps to navigate the network, and the one lady who didn't decided during the course of the evening that she'd have to get one.
On the way home I chatted with a young chap from Carcassonne who knows a colleague's church down there and had sometimes thought he'd like to go along, so I encouraged him to do so.
The evening was very enjoyable; French people are natural comedians. The food was nice but it was party food you get frozen from Picard - twee little sandwiches and tiny fancy cakes - so people did go home longing for a good hunk of bread and a scraping of duck grease. Still, it's all grist to the mill, eh!
People so rarely ask you for your opinion these days that the invitation was impossible to refuse.
So I found myself in a group of nine assorted folks discussing real-time information in the bus and tram network of Bordeaux.
Guided by a very cheeky chairman from Paris (what do you call the person who runs a focus group? in French he's an animateur) who got away with saying things he'd never be able to say in the UK, I'm sure, we had a full and lively discussion. Almost everyone uses the smartphone apps to navigate the network, and the one lady who didn't decided during the course of the evening that she'd have to get one.
On the way home I chatted with a young chap from Carcassonne who knows a colleague's church down there and had sometimes thought he'd like to go along, so I encouraged him to do so.
The evening was very enjoyable; French people are natural comedians. The food was nice but it was party food you get frozen from Picard - twee little sandwiches and tiny fancy cakes - so people did go home longing for a good hunk of bread and a scraping of duck grease. Still, it's all grist to the mill, eh!
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