Between blotch and blok

The ravens hate filling in forms, questionnaires, multiple choice exam papers....

Partly this is because we are literal-minded and strictly honest and therefore always have an answer or answers that don't fit. Mainly it's because the forms etc. are broken. (We'll ignore the misspellings, grammatical ineptitudes and illegibilities, shall we? We've not got all week.)

This wouldn't matter except sometimes these things are important. Sometimes we benefit; sometimes we can attempt to help people.

So, this week we've broken, only mildly in one case, two different questionnaires* that might allow us to contribute to assessing local needs for housing and transport, trivia like that.

First off, the housing needs survey. The first question has tick boxes for how long we've lived in the house. There is no box for anything longer than three years. We may be reasonably unusual in having lived in the same house for twelve and a half years, but even so. What to do? Omit the answer and have the rest of our input, presumably, rejected? Check the best fit? Whatever, there must be a substantial number of people in a similar situation. Not being statisticians, only occasional designers of questionnaires, we don't know whether this does actually invalidate the data for the entire survey, but it strikes us that it must be running fairly close to at least leaving it very incomplete and unreliable. The fact that on the next page, Looby Loo has either to be a homemaker or a schoolchild, since there's no option for pre-school-age members of the household, seems trifling. The questions on ethnic origin had us fuming: the first two options are "White" (not an ethnicity) and "Irish" (what if I'm white and Irish? well Phil Lynott might fit the bill). Then the usual range of choices, tough if you're Bangladeshi, confusing if you're a new age traveller but suspect that "Traveller" is being used as a synonym for "Romany" (or whatever the absolutely correct term is). There may be a good reason for collecting racially-sensitive data on a questionnaire mainly asking about whether we're intending to move house undergo household division in the next three years, but we're not certain what. Also the fine grading of the "non-white" options, but the catch-all for most of the population strikes us as odd (what's the hidden agandahere?).

Do we have to plan divorce in advance to complete this form?

After which, the questionnaire on transport planning, which you tear off and fold up to return, thereby sending back the list of dates for the public exhibitions that the planning authorities would like you to visit, is a doddle. It's a pain copying down the dates and times first. Or maybe they don't want us to be that clever?

All this consultation, this semblance of participatory democracy, could be useful and productive, if folk go to the exhibitions, if the right questions are asked, if the collected data has some validity, We just somehow feel that the design flaws are there so that the data is invalid, so that the plans are unlooked at in the basement locked in a filing cabinet (we parahprase, we know, but we don't have Hitchhikers to hand), so that all the consultation can be ignored and the authorities and Quangos can do as they damn well please.

* Ooh, that word! We always hear it as pronounced by the ineffeble Arthur Marshall with a hard "c" rather than a "qw": "kestionnaire".