“What the hell’re you doing with that?” I ask.
My roommate, Batch, has just taken a baked potato off the tray in the middle of the table. He maneuvers it behind his back as we stand to leave.
“You’ll see,” he says.
We’re in the Cadet dining room, U.S. Coast Guard Academy, December, 1995. Reading days, right before finals.
Things are pretty quiet. You’re supposed to be studying.
We walk out of the dining room into the adjacent hallway. It’s one of Chase Hall’s main thoroughfares.
Ten steps down the hallway, Batch takes a hard left into a couple of Swabs’ room. Cadets, Fourth Class. Freshmen.
He motions for me to follow him.
As Batch walks in, two Swabs pop to attention and begin to sound off.
“Sir! Cadet Fourth Class Johnson . . .” Blah, blah, blah.
Academy protocol. Swabs sound off for upperclassmen.
Plebes do the same thing at the Naval Academy, from which I’d taken a semester’s leave to be an exchange student.
Batch shoots up his hand, palm-outward, toward the Swabs.
“Shut up!” he says. “Just . . . quiet, alright?”
The Swabs stop sounding off.
We’re all standing there. The Swabs are wondering what the hell’s going on.
I’m wondering what the hell’s going on.
Batch partially closes the door, his head sticking out of it. He’s looking up and down the hallway.
Then, he tiptoes out, potato in hand, to the center of the hallway. He sets the potato in the middle of the floor and sprints back into the room.
Neither the Swabs nor I have said a word.
Still, Batch tells us, “Shut up! Just shut up, okay?”
Okay.
Batch closes the door again, nearly completely shut. He leaves just enough room to see out into the hallway.
He’s crouched down, peering out.
And then he starts laughing, mischievously.
About what? I wonder.
“Come ‘ere,” he says to me. “Get over here.”
I crouch down next to him and look out the door.
“Okay,” he says. “Now, watch.”
I’m looking out into the hallway, still not sure what’s going on.
A few seconds later, a Cadet walks by. From the insignia on his collar, I see he’s a sophomore. Cadet Third Class.
He’s walking along, then abruptly stops. He sees the potato.
Batch sees him see the potato, and he starts laughing again, hard. His shoulders are shaking up and down as he struggles to keep quiet.
The Cadet is staring down at the potato, puzzled look on his face.
He keeps staring, then starts looking around the hallway. Maybe he’s trying to find the owner.
Then he looks back down at the potato, hands on hips.
You can see he’s having a conversation with himself.
“That’s odd. What’s a potato doing here? How did it get here? Should I pick it up? Or tell someone? Or just leave it?”
He starts looking around the hallway again, as if to find someone of higher authority to consult.
“Hey, look at this . . . a potato. What do you ‘spose we should do about it?”
But no one else is in the hallway.
He looks down at the potato again.
Then, having failed to resolve the matter, he walks away.
Batch starts howling. He can hardly contain himself.
I start laughing, too. Mostly at Batch.
The Swabs are looking at each other, still unsure what the hell’s going on.
“That . . . was . . . awesome!” Batch says.
Pretty soon, two girls come walking down the hallway.
They’re Second Class Cadets. Juniors. Classmates of Batch’s and mine.
They’re chatting away about something.
They walk all the way past the potato before one of them stops and says, “Wait. Was that a . . . potato?”
“A what?” the other one says.
“Look,” she says. “Yeah, it’s a potato.”
Batch is behind the door, snorting, shaking, barely managing to keep quiet. The veins on his neck are sticking so far out, they look like they might burst out of his skin.
“What’s a potato doing out here?” the other girls says.
“I dunno. Maybe someone was taking it back to their room and dropped it,” the first girl offers.
“Why would someone take a potato to their room?” the other girl counters. “I mean, a banana makes sense. Bread makes sense. A potato doesn’t make sense.”
“No. A potato does not make sense,” the first girl confirms.
They’re both looking down at the potato.
Then, they start looking up and down the hallway, just as the first Cadet had. They, too, either need to find the potato’s owner or consult a higher authority.
“What should we do?” the first girl asks. “Should we take it back to the dining hall?”
“And do what with it?” the other girl responds. “Just give it to somebody? ‘Here, someone lost this potato. Do you have a potato lost-and-found?’ You mean like that?”
“Yeah, I mean like that,” the first girl replies, sarcastically.
Batch is clutching his ribs with both hands, in pain from trying to suppress his laughter. His forehead is sweating.
The girls pass a few seconds in silence.
Then, “Well, what do you want to do?” the first girl asks.
“Just leave it,” the other one replies. “Someone will come back for it.”
And with that, they resume walking down the hall.
Batch rolls onto his back from his crouching position at the door. He can’t hold on any longer. He’s lying on his back, laughing out loud, uncontrollably.
The Swabs look at him like he’s having a psychotic episode.
I’m laughing, too. Still mostly at Batch, but also at the girls.
That conversation was pretty damn funny.
“What should we do . . .”
Batch had a weird sense of humor.
But as time went on, I came to appreciate the genius of The Potato Test.
How do people respond to the unexpected? To things that are oddly random and out of context?
Like a potato in the middle of a hallway.
Years later, I’m running a manufacturing business.
I tell my HR manager, Bonnie, about The Potato Test. I say we should use it in our hiring process. We could put a potato in the middle of the conference room table during interviews. It could yield some really interesting insights on our candidates, I tell her.
“Insights?” she asks. “Like what?”
I don’t know, I say. We’ll just see how they react.
“Um, yeah . . .” she says. “We’re not doing a potato test.”
She says something about a baked potato in a conference room being unprofessional.
Unprofessional? No way.
I think that was a missed opportunity. Done right, The Potato Test could be a highly enlightened approach to candidate screening.
But, okay. Maybe it isn’t for everyone.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it.
Even just for fun.
It is pretty damn genius, after all.