Survey Time

There is an election coming up in November and some primaries before that, so that means we are back into political phone survey time. The last couple of days my phone has been ringing with people who want to obviously read from scripts and disjointedly mispronounce names as they get my opinion on hot-button issues. As a registered Independent and someone with their phone number on the "Do Not Call" list I'm not sure how they got a hold of my number. But, beyond the annoyance of the phone ringing, I'm mostly worried about the precedent this sets, because I don't think the primary is until September and I hope this doesn't mean I have four months of these phone calls coming. The other side, though, is that I like to give opinions to these people because I have this vision of someone going over my answers, saying to themselves, "I want to hear more about what this man has to say," which would then lead to a very successful and lucrative career as a political consultant. The problem, of course, is that I'm a rational person who lands somewhere in the middle on most issues, which makes me just like everyone else.

The woman that called today first wanted to ask me a series of questions, starting with if I had heard of the following people:
Senator John Kerry. Yes, I have actually heard of the guy who's represented my state for 30 years or so and ran for President a while back.
Governor Deval Patrick. First off, she couldn't pronounce Deval, which did not bode well for her. Clearly she is either not from this state or never got this far into her script before talking to me. Still, you should pre-read a script before and ask about names you aren't familiar with. That's broadcasting 101.
The United States Congress. Have I heard of Congress? I actually had her repeat it, because it was such a strange question. If I hadn't heard of Congress, what makes you think I would have heard of a Senator?

Then she wanted to know if I was for or against a couple of hot-button political issues:
Do you want to roll the sales tax back to 5% (sure)
Are you in favor of term limits? (no)
Are you in favor of casinos in Massachusetts? (yes)
Do you think illegal immigrants should be given access to state health benefits and resident rates to state colleges? Wow, we jumped up a notch there, didn't we? Not to mention, there is kind of a lot there and it's not really a yes or no question, is it? You can't just give an up or down answer on that, which was all she wanted from me.

The problem with all of this was that it took so long I ended up having another phone call that I needed to take call beep into my survey and I was forced to hang up on the woman before I even got through all of her questions. I hope that she at least takes the answers I did give into consideration, otherwise I just wasted 10 minutes of my life and didn't further my consulting career one bit.