I’m a sucker for a good survey. Not the ones people with clipboards try to take at the mall while intercepting you rushing out of Spencer’s attempting to make it to Macy’s before the rest of the family realizes you’re missing. Not the ones that pop up at the bottom of otherwise legitimate online news articles implying (inferring?) you can turn your free time into earnings time. I mean real surveys by real polling outlets for genuine marketing, opinion, or news pieces.

Some years ago I shifted all my verbal correspondence to my mobile number and did away with the landline phone. I was all about eliminating unnecessary or duplicate services and as I was more likely to carry a cell phone around with me than I was a corded (or even cordless) device tied to a hard connection in the wall, the cell won. Unfortunately for as cutting edge as we want to believe our smart phones are and how sophisticated we talk ourselves into believing the service providers may be, they still haven’t figured out how to handle Caller ID. Or for all I know they have and haven’t yet figured out how to charge for such an archaic concept, or the government has decided it is in our best interest not to know who is on the other end of the call, or it is in their best interest not to get into a perceived battle over privacy issues some nut might claim. As a result I don’t answer a call unless it is someone in my contact list or is a number I recognize. As a further result I no longer get to enjoy participating in one of the few random phone surveys that still might come my way.

Now I do belong to a few opinion panels and occasionally get to answer a poll or do a survey on line. I also will answer surveys published by those I follow on social media if the topic interests me and I keep an eye out for new invitations from new or established pollsters. It’s all in fun for me. I haven’t filled any free time with “earnings time” and the most I’ve ever gotten from answering a survey was a $15 gift card.

I like surveys. And I think I like giving people a piece of my mind, but then that’s what this blog is for. And now you know we’ve gotten to the meat of the story, the heart of the topic, the reason for being here you and I. Who is getting a piece of my mind today?

You may not recognize it from my writing but I try to keep myself on the right side of the grammar and usage police. Some time ago I taught a few classes at a university. At that time there was a rather decent size to-do brewing over perceived favoritism demonstrated by the grading of essay type questions on tests and we were encouraged to administer multiple choice tests and to use machine gradable answer cards. (This was in the 90s. Now personally I think somebody had purchased a bunch of these cards for a dying technology and that somebody saw their budget approval rights in jeopardy if said cards did not find their way off the storeroom shelves. Just thinking out loud.) Anyway, I became the Mad Professor of Multiple Choices. Every question not only had three seemingly logical answer choices (a, b, and c) but also multiples of those choices (a and b, a and c, b and c) and total inclusion (all of the above) or exclusion (none of the above). I was always careful to arrange the answers so “all of the above” came before “none of the above” so I could not get drawn into the argument “but Perfessor Evil Tester, how can ‘all of the above’ be right if it includes something that might be right and ‘none of the above’ sayin’ that none of them is right ’cause there ain’t no way nothing can be right and not right at the same time.” I knew my tests, and my test takers! If you consider that a multiple choice test is just a big survey you could say now I know my surveys also.

So, to make a long story short (and aren’t you glad you’re not getting the long version?), I had to scratch my head when this little gem popped up in my Facebook feed, although it was Facebook.

Hmm. Did you watch TV last night? Yes, No, Not Sure. Not Sure? Really? You can’t tell if you were watching TV? Not “Both yes and no depending on when last night.” Not even to old “Prefer not to answer.” Nope, they really asked “Not Sure.” How are you not sure? Wait, I have it. You were watching a television network broadcasted show via a streaming service on your handheld mobile device. That makes sense. Yeah. Probably an offspring of the “Hey Perfessor” guy.

Oh, just so you know, somewhere in this country the “Hey Perfessor” guy is part of somebody’s health care team. Let’s just say I “prefer not to answer.”