Thursday, July 17, 2008

Polling sucks

I am in the middle of tabulating the results of a readership poll that I sent out in one of my publications. The publication goes out to several hundred thousand people. We received about 40,000 responses. I was a little bummed about that. I was hoping for at least a 10 percent response (so, it goes out to more than 400K - got that?) but now that I'm having to do data entry on all this crap, I'm happy we didn't get any more than we got.

I've brought in two reservists for two weeks to assist in tabulating the results, but, so far, things are not going well. I cannot tab 100 percent of the time. In fact, yesterday was the first day I had to do any tabulation. I completed 500 cards. My reservists have done about 500 total combined from Mon.-Wed. I doubt I'm going to get through 40,000 by the end of next week. I'm not sure what to do. I don't know how to make people go faster.

If these folks were doing well, they'd get all kinds of effusive praise from me to their reserve commander. As it is, I'm wondering if I might need to call him and ask for better troops.

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