Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

This time, Zogby wanted to know if I would do various things if I could be sure of not getting caught; whether I had done said things; and whether I considered each to be cheating.

( the specifics, cut in case anyone expects to be surveyed and wants to wait )

The current Zogby survey has a lot of questions about potential Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons, including several of the form "If [Iran|North Korea] uses a nuclear weapon against [the US|specific other country|"a US ally"|"any country"] do you favor or oppose retaliating with US nuclear weapons?" I'm marking a straight "not sure" on all of them, because I'm not, in part because I suspect it would depend on specific circumstances, but one question jumped out at me:

If North Korea uses a nuclear weapon against Japan, do you favor or oppose retaliating with U.S. nuclear weapons?

The phone rang about half an hour ago. I answered it, expecting to hear cattitude's voice on the other end.

It was a stranger, who said he was calling for the Internal Revenue Service, which he then proceeded to define in case I didn't know. Had he asked for either of us by name, I'd really have worried, but instead he explained that he wasn't calling from the IRS, but on their behalf. They were taking a survey, wanting to know about the design of IRS publications and the Web site.

It was a poorly constructed survey: repetitive, sometimes having only numerical options for how well or poorly something worked, when the previous question had determined that I had never used that particular publication or service. But I did my best to tell them what I thought of form design and of the Web site (I praised it for not being full of bells, whistles, and [f|F]lash). There were also questions to which my response was "Does that mean P or Q?" and the surveyer didn't know, so put down "no answer".

But yes, the tax people are doing customer surveys.