I hate polls. Oh, you know the ones. The ones that like to be brandished across the headlines of newspapers across the country telling everyone else how you and I feel. Funny, but I don’t know how they do it. They have never asked me.
Oh sure, I am asked about my opinion regarding how I enjoyed a particular experience with one of my service providers. At work, I’ve been asked about my perceptions about the Lean process.
But I’ve never been one of those “of those 1,000 likely voters to vote in the next election” or even a “300 people who are thinking about purchasing a new car in the next year.”
I often wonder who these people are who think they know what I am thinking. They seem to have a lot of opinions about things, and rarely do they reflect my own. I know this is definitely the case in politics.
First, neither the left or the right want my opinions. They’re smart enough not to contact me in the first place, because they will know that I will give them an earful. When it comes to politics, I am not a ‘yes/no’, or ‘likely/unlikely’ kind of guy. While I know that they do poll independents, I’m not sure how they find us. We’re a pretty rare lot to begin with, and at least in my state, I don’t register as an Independent, hell, I don’t have to register to be any party at all.
Politics seem to be the land of polls. Not too surprising, the polls all seem to differ, too. That’s largely because they take such a small sampling of people. I’m sure some statistics whiz could explain to me why a random sampling of 10 people can represent hundreds of millions of Americans, with an error rate of plus or minus 10 points, but really, who believes these kinds of things to begin with?
Oh, that’s right, the people doing the polls and the people they are doing the polls for. As you can see right now, polling is big, big business. No one calls you these days to see what kind of toothpaste you’re using or what you’re watching on television; they want to know who you’re going to vote for.
I have to really wonder who they are, what they look like and how they live. I can just picture a pollster in a bar on a Friday night.
“Hi, I’m Monica. Nice to meet you.”
“Hello, I’m Frank. Do you prefer white or dark meat?”
“Excuse me? What kind of question is that?”
“Oh, nothing. Just curious. But I also have to ask, ‘What’s the likelihood that you might sleep with me tonight – Not a Chance, Unlikely, Possibly or Absolutely?'”
“Definitely, Not a Chance.”
“And just how many men have you slept with in the past six months? One to two. Less than 5, 6 to 10 or more than 10.”
It’s then that pollster boy finds himself on the floor. There was a measurable margin of error in his approach and certainly he’s not going to get the results he had hoped for.
Certainly, when it comes to less important polls – those that have nothing to do with the future of our country – I have indeed been one of the small sampling of people who are supposed to be just like all of you.
I must admit, I’m not really like a lot of people. Perhaps none of us are. But I will go ahead and answer the questions anyway.
I start out fine, using their rating scales to answer the inane questions they ask me. I’m sure they don’t know that I am screwing with them from the get-go, largely because the term, “None of your business” comes to mind.
So I just give them all sorts of answers. I know how to handle the first ones. They are the trick questions, the ones that are supposed to tell the pollster whether I am one of the qualified people to poll. If I answer correctly, I can get more questions, the ones that I can play with.
As such, I will pretend to have purchased a car in the last year, or that I’m likely to buy a new refrigerator in the coming year (even though I am a renter) and we’re off to the races.
From there, I just go all over the crazy board with answers. I feel very strongly about things, or not strongly at all. I rarely give an N/A in response or pick anything near the middle. I think polarization is an important component of the science of polling, so I really want to give these guys something to talk about over drinks at the bar where they can’t ever land a woman.
I figure that by giving them these answers, I can be a real polling standout. I would be the golden boy of that poll, being the one they have to marginalize as an error in sampling. I would be the give or take three points guy.
Hey, I’m certainly not going to give any poll taker serious answers to work with. I’m not data, as we have already discovered.
I know there are people out there, some of my peers in fact, who dabble in market research who will tell you that polls are important.
I would have to Strongly Agree, if they are the polls that end in ‘e,’ i.e., North poles, barber poles, pole positions at the Indianapolis 500 and poles strippers latch onto with their thighs and defy gravity.
I wonder why there aren’t any polls taken of strippers to find out which poles they prefer. Now that would be an interesting poll. Unfortunately, there’s no money to be made in poll poles, except the dollar bills that litter the stage if the right pole is used. I wonder if the IRS would let me write that off as a pole tax?
In the Emerald City, pollarized more than ever,
– Robb