Luckily I discovered this site and read The Lie Behind the Lie Detector before my polygraph. I just took a polygraph for a position at a local LE agency. So now I'd like to share my experience. 

Let me start by saying I do have a few things in my past but I disclosed them all and they are not disqualifiers. I just personally kinda feel guilty about them. I did choose to use countermeasures because of all the innocent people that I've read about that have "failed". As soon as the pneumo tubes were placed I used the scorable breath counts until they were removed, and the tongue biting technique on the control questions. 

I was led to a room with a plain chair, the "hot seat", and a desk with a laptop on it. I was told to sit in the plain seat and he was going to ask me some more background questions and then he told me there were no surprises; he would cover every question now that he was going to ask on the test. I knew this is where he wanted me to make any new damning admissions. I told him I was comfortable with everything I had disclosed in my background packet and made no new admissions.

He then proceeded into a beautiful diatribe about auto responses and how we can't control them, and used all kinds of scientific words that I can't even remember to explain how the test works. On the inside I was laughing, but on the outside I kept a very interested "amazed at the wonders of science" kind of face.  

He hooked me to the machine and then ran through a series of questions to "calibrate it to me". He asked me if I drank water, had shoes on, had hair etc. Then he told me he would ask me questions about lighting in the room and I was instructed to answer in an untruthful matter regarding them. Such as: do I honestly believe the lights were off right now. I said yes. There were about 4 of those type. I knew those were the control questions. 

He then had me pick a number between 2 and 8. He took painstaking efforts to make sure I knew what my number was by asking me about 5 times in different ways. He told me he was going to ask me sequentially if it was X and I was to say no to all of them. Afterwards he was going to ask me if it was X randomly and I was to answer truthfully. 

He then asked me how important integrity was to police work on a scale of 1 to 10. I told him 10. He asked me what I thought mine was, I said 9. Then he explained as an honest person as I was he was pretty sure I would answer no to the following question, which he asked and then continued to say that he was pretty sure my answer would be....(he left a pause for me to answer what he and I both knew he wanted) and I said no. He told me that was good. 
Then he asked me if I was good at math and he would ask me math questions during the test and I was to do it all in my head and not mumble anything but to clearly say only the right answer out loud. 

I was told now the test was about to begin and to hold still. He plunked a webcam down on the desk pointed to my face and told me to focus on a spot on the wall. He pumped up the BP cuff and started with a water/shoes/hair question. Then a light question, then always following a light question came the relevent question. Was I truthfull about...? He would randomly mix in a hair/shoe/water question. At the end was the math question. We repeated this cycle 2 more times (he explained so they could get an average or something) with small breaks in between to let the blood flow back to my arm. 

After the 3rd round of this he told me the test was done but kept me hooked up to the machine. I guessed a post test interview was coming and I didn't wanna go down that way. He then asked me: of all the questions, which one concerned me. I told him none of them. He asked me, but if I had to pick one, which one would it be. I told him again none of them because I had answered truthfully to them all. To which he replied OK and proceeded to unhook me. 

We had a silent walk to the exit of the building, and that was it. I'll find out soon how it went.

Thier arguments sound so funny when you sum them up like that. Thanks for the good laugh!