I don't know why, but in a fit of unfounded financial panic which may or may not be related to a rare planetary shift not experienced since 726 B.C., I signed up to be one of those people who does online surveys for money.
I regretted it as soon as I did it. And now, every day without fail, my inbox is pummeled with more spam than I could have ever imagined possible. There are 250 messages in my spam folder right now. I am afraid to look in there.
I had this misguided notion that doing web surveys would be funny. I thought I would enjoy the feeling of paying for groceries by answering a bunch of questions like: Do you shave your legs? Armpits? How frequently? Do you experience in-grown hairs?
To be fair, online survey-taking is quite the industry. I bet a million stay-at-home-moms do this, filling their PayPal accounts with $0.75 here and $0.50 there. Because that's how much a survey pays you. If you're lucky. Some of them offer you a discount on their products or $20 in coupons in lieu of real payment. Others make you pay $16 to register and then give you $20 back.
All of them force you to sign up and register with a name, email and mailing address, ensuring you a mountain of junk mail every week for the next seven hundred years. Boyfriend and, oh I don't know, THE EARTH would love that.
Junk mail is relentless. It's like termites or mice or herpes. I've been getting crap from MNBA credit card for two years. I called them and told them to take my name off the list and they told me it can take up to nine months for the mail to stop. That was a year ago. It's still coming. Seriously, if I haven't signed up for your stupid credit card after reading the first 500 letters, why would I sign up for it now?
I'm also on some kind of list for CIBC customer satisfaction surveys. I think it's because I was bored or slightly drunk one time and I agreed to take the survey. Which means I have the word SUCKER permanently written beside my phone number on their call sheets. Either that or CIBC really cares about customer service. They call me every month.
Much like online surveys, phone surveys are a bad idea. The bored, underpaid call centre employees are paid to tell you it will take five minutes, but they keep you on the phone for half an hour, chanting "Poor, Fair, Good, Very Good, Excellent" until you are in a kind of coma or trance.
A word of advice? Don't ever go below Very Good when taking a telephone survey. Honesty in this case is a bad idea because it just opens up a whole series of other questions. Why don't you find our mortgage service Very Good or Excellent? What can we do to improve your rating to Very Good or Excellent? Have your feelings changed on our mortgage services or have you always felt this way? Did you meet another more attractive mortage service? Would you agree to attend counselling sessions in order for you and mortgage services to improve your relationship? Why or why not? Have you forgotten that mortgage services stood by you when your credit was pretty mediocre and when you missed that one payment one time? Do you think your negative feelings are really fair given your own track record? Maybe you should take a look at yourself before blaming everyone else for your problems – do you need a moment to think about that?
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