Category Archives: nerd

I was IMing with the BH today, let­ting him know that I had all the ingre­di­ents ready for a french-style salad with fried rounds of goat cheese for din­ner (more on that later) and the phone rang.  It was an unlisted num­ber, but in the vein of doing things that aren’t actu­ally brave but that scare me regard­less, I picked up the phone.

It was the Gallup Poll.  And the Bet­ter Half wasn’t home to answer it.

How often does the Gallup Poll call in one’s life­time?  Rarely, I’m sure.  It’s one of those things, like Nielsen fam­i­lies and TV rat­ings– you won­der– are they just mak­ing shit up?

Appar­ently not.

Now, I’ve writ­ten before about the BH’s mar­ket­ing geek­ery, and I knew that if I didn’t answer the ques­tions, he’d con­sider it grounds for divorce, or at least some full-body Olympic-class eye­rolling.  I mean, this is a man so ded­i­cated to his “art” (airquotes intended) that he has lis­tened to the Gallup Poll Daily Brief­ing Pod­cast (I KNOW, RIGHT?  Though it seems like it no longer airs, I’m unable to tell) and been able, with uncanny abil­ity, to imi­tate the accent of Frank M. New­port, Editor-in-Chief of the Gallup Poll.

And damned if the woman on the other end of the phone didn’t say it just like he does.  New­port, that is, not just the hus­band.  It was uncanny.

The poll itself?  Pretty bor­ing.  It was maybe twenty ques­tions (I know, I should have kept count, or recorded the con­ver­sa­tion, or some­thing, one more sign what a Bad Wife I am) about cur­rent thoughts on per­sonal and national finan­cial health and per­sonal health.  It really wasn’t that inter­est­ing, except that among the major dis­eases they asked me if I was suf­fer­ing from, one of them was depres­sion.  I said yes, and got a bunch of depression-related ques­tions about work and my out­look on life, etc., and oth­er­wise answered the polite, clear-spoken woman’s questions.

“Thank you for assist­ing the Gallup Poll, Democ­racy on Demand,” she said when she signed off.  The BH was thrilled, because appar­ently that was one of Newport’s trade­mark sig­noffs.  He prac­ti­cally flapped his hands in fan­girl­ish glee.

And yet he had the audac­ity (the gall! the nerve!) to com­plain when I pro­posed call­ing this post The Apoth­e­o­sis of Polling, or per­haps the Ne Polls Ultra.  (Even I deemed A-poll-theosis too tor­tured to essay it.  Oh, wait, I just did.)

Really.  Some peo­ple are so demanding.

He geeks about polls, I geek about puns.  I think we’re even.