Friday, May 06, 2011

Why I Quit Taking Surveys

Readers of this page will know that I used to take a lot of online surveys. They were kind of fun, and put me into the running to win prizes that I never won or to earn points that expired before I could amass enough to acquire that nifty looking ballpoint pen or some other glitzy trinket. I stopped doing them, for the most part, because they had become repetitious, as well as...well, here’s this:


Perhaps you see the problem. The correct answer to the question is, in fact, zero. But zero is not an option, nor is the question optional. Because the originators of the survey failed to sufficiently think through their design, I am left with two choices:
    1. Lie
    2. Quit
I chose the latter, not only because of my legendary devotion to total honesty (made that up) but also because if the survey writers make a boneheaded mistake like this at the beginning of the process, the odds are not good that the rest of the undertaking will be any better.

Besides, I suddenly remembered why I had quit taking so many surveys.


1 comment:

Erika said...

Exactly! I still do take an occasional survey, but am much more cynical about them once I realized how manipulative many of them are. I would think the legitimate pollsters would do some educating of the public about all the pretend surveys/actual propaganda out there.