QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS…

A few weeks ago I mentioned a strange and rather alarming experience I had with what may or may not have turned out to be junk mail from a company claiming to be involved in debt collection. It was all a bit traumatic and not a little bit annoying too, but hopefully that’s all gone away for the time being.

Rather strangely, however, on that very same weekend I also got a telephone call from Ipsos MORI, the poll people, asking me if I had a few minutes to spare to answer a survey they were doing.

I was, of course, rather naturally on my guard after all the letter shenanigans of the previous couple of days, so initially I did my level best to seem rather reluctant. Sensing this, my interrogator told me that the survey was about the London Olympics and I played my trump card: I had no interest whatsoever in the London Olympics.

This of course did not work, as the questionairre was really about companies that were sponsoring the Olympics and so, after a bit more chunnering  and mumbling on about not wanting to give out personal information over the telephone (like giving out my age, even though a quick internet search about the content of these very pages could probably tell that to the world if it were remotely interested), I agreed to answer his questions, all the time remaining on the alert for those “out of the blue” queries that might really have been trying to elicit details of my credit cards or bank account in much the same way that rummaging through my bins might.

I was, after all being most unfair because, in the past, I have willingly answered their questions, and indeed have been known to do one of their week-long studies of my behaviour before now, and once let one of their terribly nice researchers into my home to fill in pages and pages of some survey or another, so it hardly seemed fair to refuse this guy who was, after all, just trying to do his job, and it wasn’t as if I didn’t have the spare time on a Sunday afternoon.

I’m not sure what good my answers were, though, because they were mostly “don’t knows” really. So much so that the beloved, who was listening in, asked me whether they were conducting some kind of vagueness survey. However, as I’m forever pointing out to her that those cosmetics adverts that claim that “85% of women agree” always seem to display the tiniest of captions that say something along the lines of “26 of 31 women surveyed” which hardly seems to be a huge sample to me, I can’t really imagine my little answers could do anything but harm the outcome for the massive corporations and would no doubt be thrown into the bin of “unrepresentative results” anyway.

Coo! The things we talk about for fun in our house!

So, whilst still on the alert for the possibility that my caller was phishing for personal data that he could sell on to some criminal masterminds, we stumbled on with our merry dance and I showed my usual ignorance when it comes to all matters of energy supply, failed to recognize the vast majority of the names of the energy supply companies that feed this great nation of ours with all its power, many of them turning out to be French it would seem, and found out that I was totally unaware of any of the companies that are spending their corporate millions on the huge folly otherwise known as “London 2012”.

Granted, there were a couple he mentioned that usually are the ones that sponsor these kinds of events, but I could honestly say that I didn’t know whether they actually were, because each of them had a big enough rival that might just have beaten them to the punch. Not only that, of course, but in previous years, when I have been made aware of their official sponsorship of whichever event it was, I’ve been more concerned as to whether they could honestly consider themselves to be purveyors of a “health drink” or whether the term “official restaurant” could really be accurately applied.

Nevertheless I’m still savvy enough to spot a tallying question to ensure that my answers are consistent, and, despite all my wariness, the whole process was successfully completed although, if they do only find another thirty people like me, however unlikely that might be, the results might just persuade all of those corporate sponsors that they really are wasting all of their money, especially amongst people of my age living in rural areas so far from where the Olympic events are probably likely to take place. Although I eventually threw him the bone that I might just watch one or two things on TV if I really can’t find anything else to watch (I did, after all, quite enjoy the rowing during the Athens games - no, not the 1896 ones… - when I was up early and writing some nonsense a few years ago, so it’s not without precedent), my questioner also seemed rather disappointed that I wouldn’t be seeking out any of those “must have” tickets so that I could “enjoy” the events whenever it is that they do finally happen…

Sometime during 2012, I suspect, although I can’t be quite certain when exactly.

Still, I do now wonder what Ipsos MORI will be able to read into the psychology of my ignorance about the Olympics and whether my little contribution to the vast numbers of statistics will sway or skew the results in any way…

I suspect I’m just going to be filed away with the other nutters.

Again.