Answer, Answer

I discovered the most annoying thing on the Internet, today. It's called Scorecard Research. All I'd been doing was visiting one of the food blogs on my regular reading list - nothing in the least bit dodgy - when this bossy little pop-up ad comes up instead, with bold font that told me to "Tell us about your Internet usage'. That was it. No 'please', no neon promise of winning a $1 million jackpot if I click on it, no neon promise telling me that I'd already won $1 million - nothing.

I get tons of pop-up ads a day, all annoying in varying degrees, and I'm pretty easy to piss off. I once made my university wait a whole year before I would fill out an alumni career survey, and even then, I was so annoyed, that I put myself down as an "Internet technopreneur" and said that I belong to the $1 million-$2 million income bracket. (If one of you backroom folks is reading this, this is why your bell curve has crazy-ass skewedness. My bad).

Anyway, the Scorecard Research ad has reached some kind of nadir in terms of rudeness and ineffectiveness. If I wanted a marketing firm to nose around in the ass-cracks of my Internet surfing habits, I'd bend over for Facebook or Google in the normal course of my using their services, thanks. Even the careless Nigerian chappie who's perpetually losing his grip on the throne and needs your bank account number to transfer his considerable fortune into puts more thought into his emails. "Tell us about your Internet usage", indeed.

I was so incensed, I spent a full three seconds Googling the firm and unearthed a whole bunch of complaints from 2009 about an identically named entity linked to some kind of pesky cookie or bug that slows down people's computers. Granted, the current asshole company could be a completely different one from the 2009 asshole company, but it goes to show that most firms doing research are just better-educated telemarketers.

There's nothing more despicable than someone accepting money to climb into other people's brain. There's no skill needed for that sort of thing - just a dearth of self-respect and some degree of grubby voyeurism. If a market researcher were back in high school, he'd be the kind of person asking his friends if they think his penis is huge.

One of them, a local compay I won't name, is even using children, now. The boyfriend took me to a museum as a treat for my birthday this year, and every time we crossed the lobby to get from one part of the museum to another, this chubby child no older than 7 would accost us with a clipboard. We fobbed her off each time, but she cornered us when we were leaving. I took pity on her then because I'd mistakenly assumed that it was for some cutesy school project, but mostly because the kid had the faint beginnings of a moustache on her face and I knew life was not going to be one giant prom night for her.

I'd expected the questions to be something along the lines of "Can you name our first President?" or "How important is history to you?", seeing as to how we were in a museum.

But instead, the survey questions rapidly revealed themselves to be the kind asked by people wearing neckties that restrict bloodflow to the brain. "How much would you spend in a museum giftshop?" for example. ("Zero").

At the end of it, the hirsute little girl wanted my name as well, which I refused to give, right after getting a closer look at her tag and seeing the name of a research firm on it. Seeing as to how they haven't started teaching kids how to disagree with other people in school, she stood there dumbstruck as I turned to leave. Her mother, however, came flying after me through the doors of the museum, saying that the agency wouldn't pay her kid if I didn't leave a name.

What followed was the longest lecture I'd ever given someone almost twice my age, about the invasiveness of surveys, the exploitation of children and the disingenuousness of her approach.

I really should have kept it simple: Everyone hates surveys - and invest in electrolysis for your child.

As we walked away, the boyfriend whispered to me - "We should have just given them some names. We could have been Harry and Annie Kok".