Hometown Anonymous Survey, If It's Your Birthday

My hometown of Westerville is asking residents to take a survey about city services. Postcards were sent in the mail to help residents get to the survey website.

Here's a scan of the survey:


My initial thought was that they might track me down if I said some awful things about the city. (I really don't have any thing bad to say. Westerville is an great place to live with excellent city services.) Luckily, they included this disclaimer about anonymity:


That's great! They will not track my responses with some type of household identification number. And then I read down a few lines of the instructions:


Nice. I really assume that they are not using this number to track residents, but rather the areas of town or perhaps to only allow one survey per household. But they probably should have called that number something a little different.

The best part of the instructions comes a few lines later when they try to explain that this is a household survey and that only one member of the household should answer the online questions. For the couple that can't get their shit together and decide who should fill out the survey, they provide a marriage counseling solution:


This is how custody battles should be resolved in court.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

And if they share the same birthday as my parents do, then what? Hat size?

Anonymous said...

In another lifetime I lived in Columbus and as I recall I've been to Westerville and there's no such place. Or at least there wasn't when I was there. Now I have to figure out what state it is I'm in. I get it: Edsel. I live in the state of Edsel.

Now where is it?

Anonymous said...

Without unique identification how would you handle forged responses?

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