>So telephone polls on political questions are getting to be even more BS
>than they used to be. But most news media still report them as though they
>were God's truth. I suppose this is part of their urge to appear
>"objective" -- anything with lots of numbers in it must be scientific.
>
>On the whole telephone thing, my personal approach is to control the
>world's access to my ear by caller ID and answering machine. This
>obviously means that my wisdom on the political issues of the day is not
>getting picked up by Gallup, but it also saves me from requests for my
>opinion on the latest snack chips.
>
>The cell phone method also works wonders, provided you keep the darned
>thing charged, which is my problem.
>
It's even worse than that, Jon. As I'm sure you know, all those so-called "polls" done on CNN etc. based on phone in callers tell you only about who happened to be watching and was motivated to call in. Calling them "polls" degrades even that always already degraded entity.
Get in the habit of plugging the cell phone in at night, before you floss; highly preferable to the 9-10 land line calls that are nothing but a nuisance.
Oh, since I give my work phone now when people won't take no for an answer, I still get the telemarketing stuff at work (usually I just let calls go to voice-mail), but this reminds me that for those of you still dealing with land-lines and telemarketers... if there is the slightest hesitation in response (i.e. if you have to say "hello" again) just hang up. The delay is caused by the RDD computer dialer feeding your to an operator. If you hang up you'll just go on the recall list, but after a certain number of calls they'll give up. Of course most people just handle this by screening calls with caller ID, but I refused to buy one of those.
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