Cochinoman tech, sushi, poker
After I bought my Prius c, I got an email asking me to take a survey online. Normally, I don’t like to take surveys but since I had a good experience, I decided to take the time to fill it out.
Everything looked okay at first, and I was on page 2 of the form as shown below.
Then, when I pressed “Next” to go to page 3, I got the following error:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC drivers error ‘80004005’
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Transaction (Process ID 125) was deadlocked on lock | communication buffer resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.
/pages/insert.asp, line 838
Whoops. I tried going back and re-sending the page with the same results. Perhaps, they were doing some maintenance on the page.
Maybe they should log these errors to a file and show a more user friendly message. Or not.
Later, I got another email referring to the fact that I didn’t take the survey and wanting me to take it. Sorry, but you only get one chance to waste my time. Fool me once… well you know the rest.
I've had the same luck on surveys lately. Several fails like this. Also, I have had a couple of surveys that said, "Fill out the survey and get a $10 or $20 gift card," and I fill out the survey and don't get the card. (I've had several where I get the card, and I know they are legit and not scams, because they are from businesses where I've bought things, etc.)
There was one survey recently that failed on the last page of a 15-minute survey. That really pissed me off! My electric company offers $2 to $3 off on their bill for taking a 15-minute survey. Wow. $8 an hour. They really value my time.
I take a lot of surveys. Since I've worked for companies that give surveys, I know how much influence they have. I've seen executives get into huge arguments defending a single survey answer from a single respondent that they agreed with, and it's pretty amazing. A lot of times, when a company is doing stupid things, its employees will use survey answers they agree with to leverage management away from bad decisions.
But I'm also like you. They get one opportunity to waste my time. I opened a survey recently, and the first question was something like, "Thinking about the last 12 months, describe the percentage of time you spent on the following activities" and then gave a list of things like, "balancing your checkbook, running banking errands, reconciling credit card statement," etc. I was like, "WTF? Percentage of time?" and I closed the web page. It wasn't worth $20 to figure that crap out.