Thursday, October 14, 2010

Election Survey?

RANT

Looks like I'm having more rants than usual. What can I say? I'm being bombarded more and more with spam. This election survey is one example.

First, they call me during dinner time, or sometime close to it. Then, after answering standard survey questions, in which the responses is sometime not sufficiently diverse (i.e.: "It's between mostly good and very little good! What do you mean you don't have a choice there?"), they started to say that this candidate bring job, etc.

I don't know about you, but it's very easy for somebody to bring jobs in with the economic stimulus. What kind of jobs are they bringing? Professional? White collar? Blue collar? Minimum wage part timers? Also, was there an incentive for businesses to hire or will they be taxed heavily for providing these jobs?

When I asked how long will this survey take, the answer she gave was, and I'm not kidding: "I don't know." What do you mean you don't know? Usually a survey have a definite list of questions! So, my guess is, either this survey is done by extremely incompetent person, or that this is really advertising pretending to be a survey.

I didn't bother to find out. Even cutting the survey short still clocks over 13 minutes. I shudder to think what the full survey would look like. Is there no one there to say to respect people's time? How about limiting the survey to just 3 minutes?

If this has been an advertising posing to be a survey, then it has a reverse effect than intended. It reminds me of Newt Gingrich who said that a certain politician is a "tax and spender". At first blush that looks bad. But thinking more about it, I prefer a "tax and spender" much better than a "spend and taxer", or a "tax and taxer", or a "spend and spender". Although I like a "do nothing" congressman best (because it means the country is in good shape that nothing needs to be done), we have to admit that with gigantic deficit, something must be done. A tax and spender means that we will spend no money unless we have it. I like that better than the current Congress whose motto seems to be "spend, spend, and spender! For tomorrow we may be voted out due to reckless spending!"

Yes, I will vote this year. Thank you for asking.