Can you spare a moment to be surveyed?

Doing a survey quickly makes you aware of one thing. The vast majority of people have a lot of trouble answering a question clearly and simply.

It would be reassuring to think that the survey designers were considering their difficulties when they drew up their questions. You know, gentle opening, introduction of subject in plain English, logical sequence from question to question, taking previous answers into account of course.

It's not always the case. In fact they’re more likely to be thinking of their client’s marketing requirements.

A range of ethnic groups, age diversity from 18 to 80, socio-economic status from A to E, all culled straight from the phone book. And all struggling at this unearthly hour, as good, true and honest citizens of these dominions will, to second guess your intentions and deliver the answers you want to hear.

But what DO you want to know, I wonder, as I dial the seventieth number of the day and start my spiel. ‘COULD you spare a moment …?’

In this case my charm works. The lady respondent neither ‘has visitors’, nor is ‘just on my way out’ or ‘right in the middle of cooking scrambled eggs’. She can spare two or three minutes and there is not a lot better that being told your opinion matters.

‘So,’ I venture, ‘how many pieces of fruit and veg do you eat in a day?’ It’s a challenging opener, unique in its ability to befuddle, confuse and polarise.

Are we talking about pieces as in parts of a whole? If you have an apple, say, with your breakfast and cut it into quarters, does that amount to four pieces? It’s difficult to say. And if you have five types of veg with your pork loin and fruit salad to follow does that satisfy your quota for a week?

The media, health professionals, doctors, nurses, dieticians, all remind us repeatedly that we should eat fruit and veg at five different times during the day. But it’s hard to quantify, not to mention hard to achieve.

Meanwhile I strive to keep on message. A supremely effective tactic of the lost and confused is to go off at a tangent. Despairing of understanding your questioning thrust, they meander off and tell you all about their very own personal dietary approach.

It’s not that I’m not interested. Just that I only have three minutes to get the answers I’m paid for.

Several questions later we veer round the bend into the final lap. This is the heart of the survey. Does my respondent seriously think that free cooking courses might be a good idea, even though she has fifty years’ experience, has raised six children and 18 grandchildren and knows more about nutrition that any of us raised in the junk food era. It’s patronising. It’s also showing clearly that the question-mongers have not thought this through. In their single-pronged assault on the nutritionally ignorant, they just haven’t allowed for the range of knowledge and experience that actually resides in the population.

Many of my mature lady respondents brush off such disrespect with contempt. ‘Would you like information to be available about preparing low-cost healthy meals?’ I murmur in an even tone, hoping my words will be lost somewhere down the line and she will say ‘yes’ just to save time.

‘My dear, I brought up six children on war-time rations. I think I know as much about this as I’m ever going to learn’.

I’ve even been called ‘young lady’. Music to my ears now I am decidedly not.

They’re understanding though. Everyone knows that surveys are the new national service. No matter how trite, irritating and irrelevant the questions, you just smile inwardly, think of the nation and offer your response. It’s all for the highest social good and practically everyone now accepts that surveys are integral to how society works. We just have to keep on believing that they garner some vacuous, twilight truths about what people actually think.

I’m heading into the final straight now. The ubiquitous demographic details. Postcode so we can place you, age (so we can get a spread), ethnic group (and the glaring truth that a very large number of people deeply resent the moniker of White–British and insist on their Englishness). ‘Would be you be willing to participate in future surveys?’ Some do, ‘if you can catch me in’.

It’s all over, the boxes are checked, contact details recorded. They walk free (perhaps with a smug, virtuous feeling to help them through the day).

I’m on to the next Watt in the BT Phonebook. ‘Er, I’m calling on behalf of …’