Survey - Questioning your answers

What asks you a volley of pointless questions, wastes your time, makes you lie a lot and makes you feel bad? That’s right. Your girlfriend. Some would say surveys do too.

I love surveys -especially the ones taken right after they give me something to eat.  Once this girl who looks like the poster girl for bad makeup with an onslaught of rouge, glitter and mascara(No. Not Lady gaga) thrust a bowl full of a condiment explosion they called “mixture”. I wasn’t sure why they picked me but it might have something to do with the fact that I am a dashing young man or because I was in the store at 9 on a Saturday night with nothing better to do than to buy the "new and improved Domex". Back, to the test subject. It was supposed to be more “Indian” but tasted like the 10 rupees munchurian (chikan manchooryan- as they wrote) you get outside Dadar station. After I made a contorted face saying the obligatory lie “I loved it and I can’t wait for it to hit market”, I started filling the feedback form - “Make it taste like Beef. I will buy it.”

On one side I have these surveys which incentivize me to be mean and on the other there are those which are plain mean to me. The ones which tell me that I am good but not good enough and could be better but maybe not. Or that I am not a good husband or lover or hotdog vendor. The ones which tell me my passion is good but it will cloud my judgment.

And I wonder, can they map me out in just a dozen questions? (Gallup survey would say it can. But then again, no one cares about gallop scores but for the ladies in HR.)  What if we were all good enough? We all were the best we could possibly be? What happens to all these people who feed of other’s insecurities? What happens to the perfect recipe of perfection?  Well, I could make a survey with all these questions but I will rather not. Because I know there would be one smartass just like me who would write “Make it taste like Beef. I will buy it.”