The Survey

“What’s this,” she says to me.

Gerty had been watching intently a YouTube video of a Emory board grinding down the attachment to a fingernail to a sharp witch-like tip.

“It’s a survey,” I said.  I explained to her that I had done an assessment of my life, but my own assessment results conflicted with the results I appeared to be getting.  “After thinking about it, I discovered the flaw in my assessment was that I was evaluating myself.  It was biased from the start.”

Somehow I know that asking Gerty to complete a survey about me would find itself into the survey itself if she even bothered to complete the survey at all.

“Really, Robert, a survey?” I expected Gerty not to understand. After all, she was a high school art teacher. I don’t ever remember preparing exams for her students. I wouldn’t be surprised if she just drew grades out of a hat for her students.

Gerty was my wife.  She says that I’m her “life partner.”

“Yes,” I said.

Her reaction almost mirrored the store clerk this morning when I handed him one of my surveys.  I always stopped into the Drop In convenience store to pick up a copy of the newspaper, a coffee, and some kind of Danish, a little bit of sustenance I treated myself to every morning.  Doug, the morning clerk present during the morning rush was standing behind the counter arranging the cigarette containers which hung in neat colorful rows above his head.

“It’s a thing I’m doing, Doug,” I said.  I knew his name was Doug because he wore a name tag.

I insisted he take the paper from me, and he reviewed it.

“Dude, what the fuck is this?”

I explained to him that I had a very high opinion of myself, but, that perhaps I had been mistaken. “I want to know what people really think about me.”

“Mister, this is messed up? ‘On a scale of one to ten how would I rate your appearance.’”

I regretted that Doug focused in on that one question, one that fell halfway down the page. I mean Doug was no dresser himself.  The Hop In vest he wore obviously did not reflect a fashion choice.  On the other hand, the Led Zepplin T-shirt depicting what I understood to be a falling angel, the ripped jeans whose cuffs ended in strands of white cotton sweeping the floor, and pair of ratty old converse showed that he had no pride in his appearance at work.

“Yes. If you met me on the street, would you say that my appearance was appropriate or not?”  I stiffened my back a little, held my head so that my chin jutted out, my hands I placed in a gentlemanly way on my lapels.

Doug thought a minute, pursing his lips, and then, he scribbled something on the paper.  It suddenly became a game for him, he looking at me for a moment and then scribbling something on the paper.

I had my doubts about whether anyone might want to take part in such a survey. I thought I would need to provide some incentive to the survey taker in order to entice them.