So I just got off a short phone poll with a nice polite guy from AARP, which I recently joined. They wanted to know answers to four questions; all of them were probably leading to #4 which was "What is your email address so we can send you stuff?" and I didn't want to give them that.
But the first three I would have been happy to answer, had they been questions that could be answered. The first one I don't really remember, but I couldn't answer it. I remember telling the nice guy (I think he said his name was "Richard") that it was too ambiguous a question. The second question was Did I think Social Security and Medicare needed major changes in benefits and funding, minor changes, replacement completely, something like that. I told him that they needed to separate out benefits and funding, that the answer I would give for each component would be different, and that therefore it was not a question I could answer. This was the second question I had said "I can't answer that" for so he sorta gave a nervous chuckle, and went on to the third question.
The third question was Do you expect that you will get back from Social Security and Medicare what you pay into it? Again I told him that this was a very different question for each of the two. I expected to get more from the Medicare program than from Social Security, so it was a question that would have to be disaggregated for me to be able to answer it. So I asked him to move on to the fourth question (which was for my email address).
Final comments after the orange highway clover leaf of doom-y loop-da-loop.
I understand that the major point of this was to get me to be positive about AARP, and that they were asking me essentially for my email so they could spam me (even though they would never share it with anyone else, they would write me more than they do now, which is essentially none). But how difficult would it be to actually ask a couple of polling questions that would be answerable? I took a mass media class as a first semester freshman at college that taught me in one or two days how to structure a polling question so that it only asked ONE thing at a time. Otherwise the results are MEANINGLESS. And of course, I know this was a meaningless poll, but it was a waste of their effort to hire people to harvest email addresses through a poll like this. It was a waste of nice Richard's effort, and it was a waste of my time.
I didn't want to be rude, so I sat through this series of very poorly worded questions, but next time AARP calls it is less likely I will be patient about their poll. Let the nice man ask for my email, let me tell him "no, thank you, I don't want to give it to you," and we will have spent only 30 seconds, rather than three minutes or so. It wasn't that long, but multiply that by thousands, some of whom will answer these meaningless question, perhaps not even realizing how very poorly worded they are (if you had a very specific opinion, perhaps you would read into the questions that they were asking to confirm that you shared the organization's opinion, or something).
Oh, for the days when a real polling organization called to ask me how I felt about particular issues (and how I was going to vote). I guess that will be coming next year, when my state will have a couple of ballot initiatives that will be of interest. I know those polls will be better constructed. And the questions will be answerable.