Dialogue: A time we can lie without shame

By JOE BENNETT

As every schoolboy knows - no, that won't do. We can't say that phrase any more. For a start, we can't say schoolboy, implying as it does that there's a difference between the sexes - and we can't say sexes either because it inflames their adolescent passions.

The truth, of course, is that the only thing that makes adolescence even remotely tolerable is that there is a gulf between the sexes and that hormones widen it by the hour and that inflammation is fun. But truth is out of fashion.

We can't say schoolchildren either, because it demeans the little darlings by defining them by their youth and by the place that is failing to educate them, and thus tramples on their frail self-esteem. No, we have to call them students and so induct them to the modern world by giving them their very own first little lie to play with.

The whole point about students is that they study. Now go spy on the teenage bags of testosterone barrelling and boasting down the street when school is out about five minutes past midday on a weekday afternoon and try to imagine them doubled over a book.

Nevertheless, as every student knows - no, you see, it still won't do, the problem being that you can't rely on them knowing anything. The whole grab-bag of chunks of literature and gobbets of knowledge that used to be considered indispensable has been hurled from the third floor window of the teacher training college.

All truth has become relative and we have become scared of misleading youth and thus we condemn the little sweeties to a life of fumbling, guiltless, rootless discontent.

But there is one thing that we can teach tomorrow's citizens before plucking them from the teat of education and tossing them into the wicked world to make what way they can. We can teach them how to respond to telephone surveys.

More precisely, we can teach them what to do when they're heating a tin of sausages and baked beans and the phone rings and a woman asks to speak to the person in the house who is over the age of 18 and who buys instant coffee.

The options, of course, are several, of which the most obvious and appealing is to be staggeringly rude. It is the wrong option.

The right option is to whoop, "That's me, honeybun, you're talking to him,"crook the phone between ear and shoulder, tip the beans and sausages on to a plate and prepare to tell lies.

Lying to questionnaires is everyone's duty as a free-born citizen. It's enormous fun and it distracts attention from the sheer awfulness of the beans and sausages. Have you seen those sausages?

There's about four to a tin and each is the colour and size of the severed finger of a drowned dwarf. But not the texture. Oh no, the texture is of goat's brain, parboiled with a pinch of gelatine.

The survey woman will ask you to rank each of the following brands of instant coffee on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 means you would crawl over burning hymnbooks to get a sniff of it and 1 means that you wouldn't touch it with asbestos gloves.

Now's the time to lie. Tell the most monstrous whoppers. Confess a passion for that appalling powdered parody coffee that tastes like an old people's home in New Plymouth.

But be sweet to the woman who is asking the questions. It is not her fault that she's landed with the job from Dreadsville. She's stuck at home with the kids and she's got no money. The people who have the money are the slab-faced executives who grind up the New Plymouth old folks' home and try to convince you with execrable and mendacious advertising that the stuff is drinkable.

Play them at their own game. One glance at their advertising confirms that they think the public has a delta minus brain that can be duped by pictures of a svelte woman cradling a steaming cup of their horrorbroth, which is solely responsible for her having got her hands on a hunk of a hubby, two cherubic children and some nauseating furniture. Confirm their misconception.

The questions asked will be transparent. Tell them what they want to hear. Convince them their advertising works. Lie, lie, lie.

With any luck the result will be a preposterously expensive advertising campaign based on the survey, a campaign which will lose them a lot of money.

And so, because you have spent 10 minutes lying down the phone, the survey woman will get paid, you won't notice the taste of the sausages and someone in head office might just click that telephone surveys are an unconscionable invasion of privacy.

In other words, everyone's a winner - which, as it happens, is one of the few things that every modern schoolboy knows.