Just the other morning, a nice woman named Shirley (not her real name) handed me a sticker in the drive-thru line of Dunkin’ Donuts. It said she’d love to know if she had “made my day.”
That’s a tough question to answer. Could the wave of good feelings created by a large hot tea and toasted blueberry bagel be enough to carry me through the troughs of the next twelve hours? Later that night, from the vantage point of a comfortable chair, slippers on my feet and warm pipe smoke encircling my head, would I look back over the business of the day and recognize that a 23-second transaction had changed my destiny?
In a word, no.
Yet these silly surveys persist in almost every line of business. If it’s not a clerk thrusting a receipt in my face with a 1-800 number circled at the bottom, it’s an email after the sale, asking me to rank, with “1” being the lowest and “10” the highest, how satisfied I was with my transaction, whether it was for a $20,000 car or a $2 loaf of bread.
And with every inquiry, there is unspoken pressure: “We want you to be very satisfied” or “Is there anything standing in the way of your being highly satisfied today?”
The answer to that last question is yes, many things are standing in the way of my highest satisfaction.
For one thing, I’m eating on the run at a fast-food joint, standing in line behind some pajama-pant-wearing mother of fourteen whose kids all have what looks like ebola running out their noses. Nobody knows what to order, despite having held up the line for what feels like hours. One of them is consistently stepping on my foot, and another is digging orangish wax out of his ear with a plastic spoon he found on the floor, effectively killing any appetite I may still have.
Or I’m in the drive-thru lane behind a diesel truck whose driver believes that everybody wants to hear the beer-drenched musical epic blaring out his speakers, even overtop the revving of his engine. He’s ordering enough food to feed a small army and flirting with the voice on the loudspeaker, calling him/her/it “honey” and “babycakes,” unaware that he’s caused a six-car nuclear meltdown behind him.
So, no, I’m not highly satisfied, very satisfied, or even just plain old satisfied.
And what if I were, indeed, only satisfied? On many surveys, “satisfied” translates to a 7 out of 10, a perfectly acceptable score. But I’m always pressured into being “very” satisfied, usually by employees with large, limpid eyes and wheedling voices whose very existences seem tied to the score that I, a complete stranger, will assign them through an automated phone call.
To me, “very” satisfied means you’ve followed me home, waxed my car, shampooed my carpets, and fed me grapes on the couch while fanning me with palm leaves. Throwing my change at me and stuffing my greasy burger into a sack is not enough to merit the modifier “very.”
Worse yet are the surveys that ask me to describe my satisfaction in words. How the hell am I supposed to do that? “The way Agnes drizzled guacamole on my cheesy potato burrito was nothing short of sublime?” “The replacement windshield, needed because some punk kid didn’t know how to catch a baseball, was artfully installed by Sidney, illuminating the interior of my car just as surely as Michelangelo’s paintings illuminate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?” Gimme a break.
Sometimes, companies entice you to take surveys with the promise of a prize. “Just take our brief survey and you could win an iPad Mini!” and “Call this number for a chance to win $500!” are pretty common come-ons.
Of course, you have a better chance of being plucked out of your bed by aliens from Uranus than you do of winning any prize. And as soon as you indicate that you are anything other than very satisfied, your entry goes directly to the bottom circle of Dante’s Sweepstakes Hell. As a consolation, now that the company has your phone number or email address, they can sell it to other companies, who will in turn attempt to get you to buy their junk and rate their associates.
All of which is why, Shirley, I’m not going to log on to any website and rate our transaction. I smiled at you when I pulled up to the window — you might have thought I looked constipated, but trust me, it was a grin — and thanked you for your efforts. That’s the extent of our relationship. Let it be enough.
This column was originally published in 2014. I don't know if Shirley still works at the local Dunkin' Donuts.
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