I subscribe to Computer Shopper magazine. From time to time, they’ll send me a consumer survey to fill out for a chance to win $1,000. I’ll do them when I have the time. Who doesn’t want a chance to win a thousand bucks? And besides, I know these things are used to help the magazine build better content, so I’ll do my part.

This morning’s survey gave me a laugh. I was doing fine until I came to a part where you had to mark off categories of items that were purchased in the last year. Everything from Flash drives to scanners to hard drives and video games, you know. I buy a fair share of tech for my family and me, so I had a bunch of check marks. I hit the button to go the next screen and got this:

The question wasn’t “which, if any, of the following items have you purchased in the past year, choose the most recent 10?” It just says to pick the products you’ve purchased. So I get an error message that says “Please select less than 10” and what am I supposed to do, decide which of the products on the list I want to pretend I didn’t actually purchase?

After deselecting a few I realized why they only wanted 10. For each item, they want me to say how much I spent, where I bought it, why I bought the item and why I picked the store. All with select the radio button or pull from a list type forms. Bleech. I stopped after the 3rd or 4th one. Sorry, that much time is not worth it and there was no “save and come back later” button. Maybe they should have asked about purchases in the last month or so. A year is a long time for someone as gadget happy
as I am.