Surveys...

Because I am promised the small chance of some day being able to earn some small trinket I have no use for, I participate in online surveys for Harris Interactive. Now, most of the time these are pretty harmless polls, with occasionally some strange and interesting bits thrown in. (One time, I had to look at a storyboard for a public service ad on depression and let them know whether it made me view depression as more of a mental illness, the same, or less... among other things). In all, most of the time the questions are bearable, apart from having to tell them every single time that I'm white, use a cable modem, and won't share my income. They remember my zip code, poll to poll, but still ask what state I live in.

That all changed with the last poll I received on hard drive manufacturers. Among a very few reasonable questions, such as whether I feel my data is safe with particular brands, there were pages and pages of completely unintelligible nonsense. Here's just one example:

Cool? Hip? Enjoy life more? What sort of hard drives have these people been smoking? Keep in mind, this was the easy page - the hard one was the radio buttons to decide which of these features was more important in buying a hard drive... the artistic style or the sense of independence it gives me.