Just finished the “2012 Great Colleges To Work For” survey sent from ModernThink, LLC. We received a message a while ago indicating that this was an important survey, and that it was important to certain people that we all fill it out.

When I got that email the first thing that came to mind was “Are you sure?”. So this morning I got the invitation to fill out the survey. I clicked my merry way through the questions and near the end there were two open-ended text-box questions. I wrote what I thought down, trying not to be terribly unfair or particularly abusive and came up with a rather compelling bit of text to include as a response for the survey. Then right before I clicked Next I thought I better re-read the invitation email, see if there was any fine print. The devil is in the details, are there any cloven-hoofywoofies behind ModernThink’s draperies?

This text immediately popped out at me:

"Please note, however, that your institution may have the opportunity to purchase a report that summarizes all employee responses to the two optional, open-ended questions at the end of the survey. The report will list all responses to those two questions in alphabetical order by the first letter of the response to ensure objectivity in reporting. In order to preserve your anonymity, please do not include your name or other identifying remarks in your responses."

Anyone who even has a passing knowledge of me can spot my writing style and my passionate bluntness right off the bat, so anything that I write really has my mental fingerprints all over it. In a way, anything that I had written in those optional boxes would have been an “identifying remark” so I highlighted the passages I spent about five minutes each writing and blanked them out. I did consider, just briefly putting in a Lorem Ipsum block, but I didn’t. I’ve learned the lesson from Facebook. It’s a lot like Fight Club, in so far that the chief rule about Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. I just extended that to the survey. It’s far better for me professionally to deflect questions, change the subject, and… oh! isn’t this a pretty flower! 🙂

In a rather tongue-in-cheek way, a white anglo-saxon protestant knows how to ford those kinds of rapids. 🙂

I’m glad I read the fine print. I’m glad I spotted the hoofywoofies. I finished the survey and I can move on with my life.

P.S. I have to give props to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman for the term “hoofywoofies”, it’s from their collaborative fiction book titled “Good Omens”. If you get a chance to read it, I highly recommend it.