Waiting for Gouda

I really enjoy taking online surveys, with all the clicking and radio buttons and checkboxes.  I especially like the ones that tell you on the screen exactly what percentage of the survey you’ve completed, with a little meter graphic.  “40% complete!” it will tell you, with what seems like a hint of desperation.  I imagine the survey makers huddling somewhere in front of a massive bank of monitors (oddly, they are also holding clipboards…  I’m not sure they know what they’re doing), furtively hoping that you have the stamina and attention span to make it all the way through to the end.   This, despite the fact that anyone who has ever taken any online survey of any kind was, at the moment of the first click, boldly and authoritatively proclaiming, “I literally have no else to do right now.  Absolutely nothing.”

So I took a little feedback survey online today, and things were going along just fine until I came to this screen:

As you can see, according the instructions, 1 is “being the least important”, while 6 is “being extremely important”.  Of course, this is typical survey stuff, and one can reasonably use their powers of deduction to assign importance levels to the other numbers.

I suspect that 3 is probably “somewhat important”.  That’s a typical survey category.  Doesn’t really mean anything.  3 is dull.  I imagine that people who go around ranking things as 3s probably wear beige and read Patricia Cornwall novels.  Although I don’t know for sure.  I suppose I could take a survey.

5 probably ranks a “very”.  You know, not quite “extremely”, but certainly more than “somewhat”.

4 and 2 are both sort of problematic, though.  2 is just better than a 1, so according to the syntax provided, I guess that it rates as “slightly less least important”, which isn’t helpful at all.  4 is utterly useless, floating out somewhere between “somewhat” and “very”.  What is the word for that?  “Rather?”  “Substantially?”  Nope, it’s no good.  4 is stupid.

But what really threw me off when attempting to rank these items was the 7.

7, with importance of such import, that it dare not be named.

More important than “extremely”, 7 sits on the lunatic fringe of the very concept of importance itself.  Is it “super-duper”?  “Ultra-mega?”  That is for 7 to know alone.