The room was unusually warm. I mentioned this to her.
She asked me, "What do you know about polygraphs?"
"Only what I see on TV," I lied. I had read
The Lie Behind The Lie Detector. She laughed. "It's much more complicated than it looks on NCIS."
The warm-up questions were fairly straightforward. She forgot to attach the tube around my midriff at first. (Was this a test? I've no idea.) The weirdest question was, "Have you ever urinated in public?"
"Yes."
She leaned forward in her chair and snapped, "When?!"
"A month ago?"
"Where?!"
"By the canal."
"Why?!"
"It was 6 o'clock in the morning, I was walking my dog before the sun was too high in the sky for her to tolerate the heat, and suddenly I needed to pee. So, I went behind a bush. No one was around. I looked."
"Oh." She seemed to calm down.
Then, I brought up the fact that she hadn't attache the tube around my midriff. That was when she attached the tube.
"These electronics are designed to monitor your <blah blah blah>. So, even if you lie, I'll know."
"So it's a bit like that song, 'My mind is telling me
no, but my body, my body is telling me
yes'?"
She gave me a blank look.
"You know... The song... R Kelly... 'Ain't nothing wrong... with a little bump and grind...' No? No idea?"
She continued to stare at me.
"Never mind. You should look it up."
She sat back down and began monitoring her instruments. She asked me the same set of questions three times. Halfway through that phase of the interrogation, she stood up, walked around the desk, leaned over me, and said in her harshest tone, "Are you
sure this is your first polygraph?"
I looked up at her and nodded.
She sat back down. I answered the questions three times. Each time, the questions were in a different order.
Then she announced I had failed. She leaned over the desk, brought her face as close to mine as she could, and said, "Is there anything else you want to tell me?"
I made a Scooby Doo face and shook my head. You see, I really
had told the truth.
The questions were:-
- Did I ______ in 2020?
- In the past six months, have I used electronics to ______?
- Have I used any _______ in the past six months?
- Is today Saturday?
- Is my name _____?
- Since my conviction, have I broken any laws?
- In the past six months, have I blamed anyone else for my behavior?
- In the past six months, have I asked anyone else to lie for me?
I'm fairly sure that I can tell which questions were which (filler, directed, presumed to lie, etc.) but it really wasn't that important to me. One of the advantages to telling the truth is that I didn't have to be particularly worried about the consequences. I am on probation, my life is an open book, and I'm doing as I'm told.
