There was, on Bowditch Street, an organization called the Institute for Research in Social Behavior. It sent questionnaires to the university faculty about the hours they spent working on University Business. The point was that they would tell the State Legislature the results and hope that this heavy amount of work would lead to increases in funding. Of course, this is all fake, similar to the NSF's idea of how to make a proposal; you're supposed to propose working on education and for joint work and communication with economists and differential equation people; and if you get the grant, then you can use it for real mathematics.

The first year I got this questionnaire, I figured I was being paid for about 40 hours a week, although it was clear that I was supposed to make up stuff to get to at least 60 hours. I listed my class hours and my office hours and added a little bit of lying in bed thinking up theorems to get exactly 40 hours a week of hard educational work.

The next year I got the questionnaire again, and this time I changed my reply to this.

A few weeks later, I went to breakfast on Sunday morning with some graduate students and their friends. One friend worked for IRSB, and told me that my letter had been posted on their bulletin board with my name attached. I was famous! One moral for worriable people, though, is that so-called anonymous questionnaires are not anonymous; my secret code had been looked up in the database so that my name was found.