(FORTUNE Magazine) – Some kids want to be an astronaut or a fireman when they grow up. Not me. I always wanted to be part of a Nielsen family. I imagined Nielsen families as clean-scrubbed, with Mom in pearls, Dad with pipe and cardigan, and two adorable little kids named Junior and Sis. Their last name was Nielsen. And their mission in life was to watch TV and decide what the rest of us got to watch. It seemed like the best job on earth.

As I grew older, that dream faded. But it all came back last October when a postcard arrived in my mailbox: "It is my pleasure to tell you that your household has been chosen to be a Nielsen family." I did a dance of joy. The card, however, attempted to whip me into even more of a frenzy: "In a few days," it continued, "you will receive a long-distance phone call from us to explain this exciting opportunity." I loved that adjective "long-distance," placed there, it seemed, as a further enticement. It was as if I were living in the 1950s. (Ma! Pa! Stay off the phone! I'm gonna get a long-distance phone call!)

The phone call, oddly, never came, but I did eventually receive a Nielsen diary and a dollar bill, in payment for my services. The diary itself was a flimsy, stapled set of pages. It was made up almost entirely of a grid, which I had to fill out to denote times when my TV was off, times when it was on, and what I was watching at 15-minute intervals. This was beginning to look suspiciously like work. The diary also asked questions like "If you watched no TV at all this week, please check a reason: ( ) Went on vacation; or ( ) TV was broken." The notion that I might have a rich social life, filled with other leisure activities, was effectively ruled out as a possibility. I mean, I don't. But it would have been nice for them to pretend.

Nonetheless, I began filling out my diary with a sense of purpose: I had been summoned to TV jury duty. But I soon realized that the task before me was impossible: I don't watch TV in 15-minute increments. Most shows are lucky if they get more than ten seconds. I don't like to watch specific programs: I just like to watch television. Pretty soon I'd had enough. I decided I wasn't under oath and certainly wasn't being paid enough for the amount of work Nielsen was expecting of me. I became a rogue Nielsen home.

It started when I looked at the top of the page, where I had neatly written my name under "Male head of household." But that looked so lonely next to "Female head of household." So I wrote in "Gladys." Gladys, I decided, likes the sight of blood. During commercial breaks I started hunting through TV listings for shows she might want to watch, and within minutes, she had taken in an NHL game and a documentary on sharks on the Discovery Channel.

Once Gladys was sated, I realized that there was nothing keeping me from having the Nielsen family of my dreams. I inked Junior and Sis into two of the slots. Junior, I figured, watched cartoons in the afternoon when he came home from school, while Sis liked the morning talk shows. And we all watched the Today show religiously, because we like that nice Katie Couric. During commercials, I filled out the diary's questions about my income, favorite shows, and so on. I happened on a box for my family's ethnic group, and with a flick of the pen, we were all suddenly Eskimos.

For the rest of the week, my Eskimo family and I watched TV together--cozy, I imagined, in our whale skins, eyes glued to the set as we gnawed on seal. Soon their tastes emerged: Sis preferred Rosie O'Donnell to Roseanne, while Junior surprised me by having a deep and abiding affection for anything on UPN. On Monday night, PBS telecast a special performance of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats, and in a brief fit of sadism, I forced the whole family to watch it.

Around this time I began wondering about the effects my family's choices would have on other viewers: Would Friends add an Eskimo on my account? Would Katie Couric get another pay raise? Nielsen had supplied a toll-free phone number to call with questions, so I dialed it up (long distance!), and reached a very nice lady who told me that the company mails surveys to 1.5 million homes. Given that the whole TV audience is something like 100 million homes, my family represented only something like 67 homes. I was disappointed: I had hoped to be the TV equivalent of the electoral college, standing in for whole states. I pressed on.

"Hey, would you be able to tell if I were to make stuff up?"

"Yes, we can usually tell if it's not correct," she said, adding darkly, "You wouldn't consider doing that, would you?"

"Me? No. No, of course not."

"Good."

Now I was beginning to feel guilty. But not too guilty to keep from having the whole family watch a rerun of The Rockford Files.

I knew, though, that our time together was drawing to an end. That night I treated Gladys to a final game of hockey. I filled out the portion of the diary that asked for "Any thoughts you may have on TV." ("Scented television might be nice.") And then I sealed my family into their postage-paid wrapper and mailed them off to the Nielsen company. I'm going to miss them.

--Tim Carvell