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Mike's Pith & Wind - Surveys
I’ve just got off the phone with a young gel, and I’m
a bit hot under the collar. It was a phone survey being conducted
by a crowd called Galaxy Research, the existence of which I’d
not noticed before, and the young gel in this case, (Tracy, Debbie,
whatever), was as audibly disappointed as I was annoyed when I finally
aborted the interrogation. There you go you see; I used the word
‘interrogation’, a word that has connotations way beyond
the comparatively neutral ‘questionnaire’ or ‘quizzing’
or ‘interview’ words I might’ve used. And that’s
precisely why I aborted the interview – we’d moved from
the ‘illegitimate’ blocking of alcopops tax bill, to
whether I used chocolate in cooking, (a leap, incidentally, that
I found hilarious), to the ‘slaughter ‘of kangaroos.
I objected to the use of the word ‘illegitimate’ in
relation to the alcopops bill, but when the ‘slaughter’
of kangaroos came up, I just had to bow out. ‘You can’t
use such an emotive term in a survey’, I bleated, as Debbie
tried to persuade me to answer just a few more questions as though
her job depended on it, which it very probably did..
That’s one of the advantages of being in the ’60 to
64’ age bracket – you can smell a shonky pitch when
it comes down the line at you – even if it’s delivered
by a dial-up dolly bird like Debbie. I asked Deb if we were being
recorded – I rather hoped we were - but she said that we weren’t.
As she pleaded with me to continue the questionnaire, (‘It’ll
only take another couple of minutes’), she said she would
pass on.. read
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