Whoever lived in my apartment last year must have been a very popular guy, ’cause his friends still call all the time. Considering that I don’t even know the phone number offhand (my cell phone is far more practical), I normally just let the thing ring. And ring it does. Between my predecessor’s seemingly endless entourage and my having yet to figure out the nuances of how one gets on the no-call list, the thing buzzes so often that I have considered investing in a switchboard.

But about a month ago, bored studying for a Food Science exam, I decided to answer the phone and at least humor whoever was on the other end. And lo and behold, it was the good people at Nielson Media Research, offering $10 if I would sign up to become a Nielson Household.

Little did I know that my studio apartment was a “household,” and little did they know that with a full-time job at this fine newspaper and a 16-credit course load, television is normally the last thing on my mind. But the offer sounded intriguing, and a week later my television diary arrived in the mail along with a five spot and five non-consecutive one-dollar bills (which seems slightly more disturbing in retrospect than it did at the time).

Nielson Households basically work on the honor system; you keep an official diary that reads like a day planner near your television for one week, and whenever you turn the tube on or change the channel, you simply make a notation and indicate what channel and program captured your attention for at least 15 minutes.

This got me to thinking: I normally channel surf during commercials, which come at least once every 15 minutes, so isn’t it more or less dishonest for me to claim that I watched a program all the way through? But there is no margin for channel surfing in the diary, so I decided to keep my clicker-happy habit to myself, and just let whatever network I deemed surf-worthy be damned.

Then, as I began to talk to my friends and realize that seemingly no one knew of anyone else who was a member of a Nielson Household (or, in my case, the entire household, seeing as how my toaster doesn’t watch much television), I realized that the sample size for the survey in Madison must be relatively small. So all of the sudden, my diary had influence. After all, I would play a decent role in determining which channels scored ad-inducing ratings and which shows got cancelled after three episodes.

So my next inclination was to have some fun with the good folks in television land and order as much adult pay-per-view as possible. After all, quality movies like “Nurses Need Anal, Too” are long overdue for the recognition they deserve. But it turns out that although equipped with cable, the television in my apartment doesn’t have a pay-per-view option. I can’t even get the premium channels like Cinemax and claim to have watched hours upon hours of “Erotic Confessions.”

So I decided to just keep an honest diary, realizing that I was probably making myself watch more television than usual anyway in honor of this whole Nielson experiment. But after a few days, it became apparent that Fox News and the Food Channel were getting all too much action in my diary. And people would have to read through this thing after all, so I decided to turn myself into an intellect.

Do you have any idea how horrifically boring PBS truly is? I mean, if I was going to turn in a respectable Nielson survey, I had to watch at least an hour of this highbrow nonsense a day, and it was a terrible experience. My mind would wander, and I began asking myself questions like: “What would a Bill Moyer and Elmo love child look like?,” “I wonder if Clifford got that red from drinking?” and “How does Jesse Jackson feel about ‘Reading Rainbow?'”

So I closed my diary, turned the television off and decided it was time to go into some sort of broadcast detox. This involved a lot of whiskey and some anonymous drunk-dialing.

I knew that phone would come in handy eventually.