Gallup poll'd
I got my first ever call from the Gallup Poll this evening. I've been reduced to a statistic. I don't like Bush, I do like Obama, and so on. I sound like those annoying people on TV.

Two (maybe) interesting things.

1) This survey was focused mostly on issues of health, well-being, and health policy. There were loads of demographic questions, and questions about my employer and employer-provided health care. Because I'm a graduate student, normally employed to teach part-time by a public university, but on fellowship this semester, there were hardly any multiple-choice questions with an appropriate answer. I had to give answers that were the best approximation, and I'd be willing to bet that if I took the same survey a second time, ten minutes later, I'd have given some different answers. There's got to be a big slice of the population in a similar boat. (I don't mean just graduate students, but people whose employment arrangement is non-traditional, and so doesn't fit comfortably in the response sheet.) I wonder how much that screws up the stats.

2) There were a few mental health questions in the middle of the series. That section included a lengthy list of emotions, and they asked me which ones I felt yesterday. That portion of the interview went like this:

- Angry?
- No.
- Sad?
- No.
- Happy?
- No.
- Scared?
- No.
- Hopeful?
- No.

And so on.

I said "no" to every single emotion on the list. This is, at last, proof that I'm a robot. At the very least, it's proof that I don't want to admit to a stranger on the telephone that I'm not a robot. (A robot programmed to rock.)

A cheerful epilogue: One question was something like, "does your job require or allow you to make use of your best talents?" I spend a few hours every week asking myself that same question, and am nowhere near an answer. But I said "yes" to Gallup. Maybe that's a good sign?