Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

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.