Do You Have Five minutes?

Do You Have Five Minutes?

I’m a sucker for surveys. Not the surveys that you find in magazines that test whether you and your spouse are right for each other or whether your husband is still a romantic beast. Honestly, if after thirty years of marriage you need a survey to tell you if you and your spouse are compatible then you should get your head examined. And as for romance, anyone who puts the toilet seat down after thirty years is Cary Grant in my book.

It’s the surveys asking for my opinion of a company’s services that I can’t resist. They don’t have to offer me the possibility of a gift card or a trip to Bermuda. They have me at “Do you have five minutes?” It’s the possibility that my answers could affect whether or not they offer mango-passion-fruit-vodka yogurt in my local supermarket that intrigues me.

They used to do surveys over the phone that took days but I would still get sucked in. (I swear my kids went through puberty before one survey was over!) Once a disc jockey played song snippets then instructed me to tell him if I would turn the radio up, or change the station upon hearing it. I must have looked like a lunatic dancing on the phone while yelling, “Up, up, change, up!” but who cared it was fun.

And then there were the political surveys. I remember getting quite heated during a bottle bill survey. l like to think that I had a crucial part in enabling us all to stand in front of huge, clanking, recycling machines shoving bottles into their orifices even as the machine flashes its endearing message: machine experiencing indigestion please notify manager.

But now with the internet it’s a whole new world out there. No longer do we speak to real live people who lend a bit of fun to the experience. Now we have something called “Survey Monkey” to pick our brains. I wish someone would tell me why they chose that name. It gives me the impression that they don’t think very highly of my intellect. That they feel that if they put enough of us plus a few monkeys on typewriters we’ll eventually give them Hamlet.

Anyway web surveys tend to be rather short. I guess monkeys don’t have much of an attention span. But still I am selective. I only do surveys of products that I like and that offer coupons that I can print out at the end. So it’s a no-brainer that I’ll answer anything about Starbucks. I admit there are times when I begin to feel like the little animal that gets a pellet dropped into her bowl as a reward for performing correctly, but a free latte offsets that feeling nicely.

Last year I couldn’t resist a survey about the commuter rail. They hypnotized me with balloons and free bottled water. A few weeks later I was clicking little circles describing my daily commuter ride. Was the train crowded? Clean? Did the conductor call out the stops? Did the train have windows, seats, a floor? Was I enjoying the free champagne? I dutifully clicked my way through it though I have yet to see the champagne.

But lately I’ve begun doubting this whole survey business. A few months ago I agreed to become a T.J. Maxx “insider”. I was happy to help since I do quite a bit of shopping at “Le Maxx”, (accent on the second syllable please) and I didn’t mind giving them some advice.

For months I dutifully clicked my way through questions about my shopping preferences, when suddenly last month they asked me my opinion of their newly designed credit card. The choices they gave me were incredibly ugly and I told them so. After clicking on the “I-spit-on-your-design” bubble for the twentieth time (they always like to make absolutely sure that your answers are consistent) I was shocked to see something that I had never seen before. They were actually asking me to use words to tell them what was so bad about their designs. And boy did I tell them.

After that debacle I was sure that they would never send me a survey again, but I was wrong. This time they asked me about my pet.

“Aha,” I thought. “They’re thinking of adding pet stuff to their stores.”
So I was a good doobie, clicking on what I bought for the Snoopster, where I bought it, and most importantly, how often I bought it. I sensed that they might not like my answers since I consistently clicked the button that said I bought accessories every few years rather than every few minutes. I would not be the gold mine they were looking for. But it wasn’t until I hit the final question that I longed to tell them once again via words not bubbles, what I thought of their survey.

“Do you consider your pet’s welfare to be more important than your own?”

Since I was not able to use words I searched for the appropriate bubble—ah there it was the, “Are-you-people-out-of-your-frigging-minds??!!!” bubble.

I think I’m going to stop doing their surveys. I’m going to save my answers for the ultimate form that I’m sure the monkey will be sending me any day now, the “Survey, Survey”. I can see the first question now: “Just how often do you take these surveys anyway?”