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On Surveysby Ryan ClarkeI've been thinking about those email and blog surveys that ask you all the same stuff over and over: like your name, favorite music, half empty/half full, a billion things about who you used to love but were dumped by them because they loved someone else, who was a real jerk, believe me, and then they had their heart broken and you have your heart broken and lets make a survey so we can share our names and weights and favorite pair of shorts stories. I hate those emails. Because anyone who honestly answers them doesn't write the stuff that you really want to know but instead inserts little dumb quips that would be really funny if Abraham Lincoln was saying them, now that would be funny. I think that those surveys were originally designed by restaurants to find out if we want Pepsi or Diet Coke with Lemon, and if we want ours half empty or half full, and how many tattoos we have. So I have come up with a prototype of the World's First Survey That Even An Identity-Theft-oPhobic Person Or Any Other Person With At Least A Little Bit Of An Idea Of Personal Privacy Can Take Without Fear That Their Answers Are Being Monitored By Their Favorite Restaurant For Errors, And Also, It’s Short. Behold the triumph!
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START HERE 1. Would you rather have Robin Hood shoot at you from the north or from the south? Well, actually, I would say both. I would want him to shoot at me from both north and south, because then if I ducked he might hit himself and then I would be able to get out of the ant bed that I had thrown myself into in the heat of the assault. You see, that wasn’t at all embarrassing. In fact, I feel great. Except for the ant bites. This survey also works with other types of questions: 2. Half Empty or Fully Full? My first thought is “Oh no!” but then I remember that this is a trick question. Of course I choose Half Empty, because that way, if it’s my closet I still have more room to go to garage sales and buy other peoples broken junk that they are selling for $2.75 but since I’m a friend it’ll only be an easy $3. I love generous people. “But what if the Half Empty is something good, like Diet Coke with Lemon?” you ask. I would invest it in the stock market because then when the stock market goes up I can have more, and then when the market crashes on Tuesday I will become eligible to enroll in a government program to build dams in Tennessee, so either way I’m a winner, because I don’t like Diet drinks, and Tennessee is a great place for making dams. 3. How much would they have to pay you for you to walk around with a pair of tweezers perched on your ear like a pencil? This sounds like an internet scam to me; I’m not sure how it could have possibly made it through our intense screening onto this survey. I assure you, it will not be in the WFSTEAI-T-oPPOAOPW… version 1.0.0.0.1 Beta release (for testing purposes only [that was not a pun {maybe}]). But just off the cuff, I’d say about $2.75, or maybe an easy $3. 4. How many bones do you think the average politician would break falling from the roof of a standard ranch style home into the belly of an old cast-iron bathtub in the flower bed right next to the front steps, assuming that the gutters were painted light rusty blue, the politician had not combed his hair in over 23 minutes, and that you have a friend that owns a Clarence Darrow cigar? This is a beautiful question because it combines politics, aesthetics, landscaping, science, architecture, history, fashion, and nostalgia. However, I do object to the idea that a friend of mine owns a Clarence Darrow cigar, because they should have sold something that valuable on eBay for $2.75, with shipping, we accept PayPal, making it an easy $3. Is there such thing as “light rusty blue”? All that to say that I think the answer is 0 because I was unaware that politicians even had bones. But it would be just like them to have a cast-iron bathtub in their flowerbed, and then to make a law about it, although a pork barrel would be slightly more common. THE END
And that, gentlemen and ladies, is my vision for a better world.
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