Survey Says...

Today we returned to Eastern Standard Time. Again, my annual reminder of the feeble thinking designers of digital time devices. How hard is it to include a < back button? Sometimes I wish reality was a VCR Tape so we could rewind it back to a time when things were less FUBAR.

Yesterday afternoon, I anwered a call from some outfit that was conducting a telephone survey. Ordinarily, as a charter member of the Do Not Call Society, I'd have growled "Not interested" and then rudely slam down the receiver on the intruding bastards. But yesterday afternoon, the weather had turned nasty, which drove me to shelter in my basement office, ( which just happens to be next to the beer refrigerator.) Consequently, I was feeling somewhat mellow when the office phone (which does not have a caller id display) rang. Curiosity got the better of me, so I picked up the phone and agreed to answer some questions. (Full disclosure requires that I admit to really having nothing better to do.)

The overall design of the survey seemed amateurish to me. There were a lot of questions that were meaningless because they wanted Yes or no answers about things that were too vague to be useful. (Do you think your local officials are doing a good job? With no follow-up or expansion). I found those types of questions to be annoying and refused to answer them. After a few minutes it was clear that the survey was really about Mitt Romney and how I (as a registered voter in Mass) thought he was doing. I told the caller that Mitt should spend more time in the Governor's Office and run for re-election to that post in 2008. I would not vote for Kerry Healy for Governor - (The Jane Swift debacle soured me on women Republicans.) There were a lot of questions about an "Educational Reform" initiative of 1993.

I refused to answer any of these questions . ( I vote against any override or plan that would force people on a fixed income to leave town. Yeah, I know I am no longer on a fixed income, but I plan to retire again in the near future). Let the rich young yuppies who are moving into those Million dollar plus houses down the street pay for the middle school renovation project - I've been paying my dues to this town for over 25 years! The survey caller wanted to know how I felt about the current economy (Positive); Employment (Plenty of Jobs); and Same sex marriage (I have no problems with it). After 15 minutes I asked how long this was going to take. She said 10 more minutes. I told her to make a note that the survety was tedious and boring. From one of my underemployment jobs as a survey caller, I know that the caller gets paid on "completes" so I advised her to get to the end quickly.

This experience re-enforced my opinion about surveys. Most are ill-designed and therefore give ambiguous results. Besides, how valuable is the opinion of a beer swigging independent who has nothing better to do with his time? I would have liked them to ask me about Iran (Major threat to our best ally in the mideast); Iraq (We need to start our own "Oil for Protection" program); the UN (Useless and worse); Syria (et's drop the Big One and see what happens); 12 mile fishing limit (Extend to 26 miles); FEMA (Sounds like a gay rights organization. Well, I'm resigned to the fact that no one really wants to hear my opinions. I cannot side with either political side - since I believe they are both corrupt.

At least I got an extra hour of sleep last night. And I am resolved to install a phone with caller id in the basement office.