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Miscellaneous comments

by Adam C. Engst

We thought we had made the survey easy to answer, but some people still had trouble, such as this response to "What is your name?" "Sam Potts...um, no! it's Wayne Pollock (Damn these are tough questions :-)"

A few people have really caught on to the idea of electronic communication replacing paper communication, such as the people who made these concise comments.

"Responding electronically-want to save trees"

"Timeliness and electronic format. No messy paper to deal with!"

And of course there were the comments about surveys, such as this one. "A colleague recently did a small survey, asking "Pick a number between 1 and 4." He'd heard that well over half the time respondents would pick 3. It turned out to be correct..."

If you give people a chance to score themselves, there's always a couple who will go whole hog and give answers for nonexistent questions.

"Extra answers for bonus points: 1 7 3 5 8 9 3 "

"18-Blue...No, RED!!! (Copyright Monty Python) 19-No thanks, and you? 20-Dire Straits are not so bad, but why RUSH never comes in France?"

Interestingly enough, even though the average score for how knowledgeable you were as a Mac user was 8 of 10, engineers who've been working on the Mac for years tended to rate themselves relatively modestly, such as this person. "Knowledgeable Mac user (if a DOS user who has never seen a Mac is 0 on the scale): I'd argue that a DOS user would be several points BELOW zero. Many, many points. Legions and legions of numbers, obediently lined in rows and columns towering over the <ahem> I digress. I'd say I'm a nine. I've had a Mac since the Fat Mac days. I write code. If I wrote great code, I'd be a ten."