Paul designs a survey

Back in March - while on attachment at the Department of Hire you will recall - Paul had used his unique knowledge of statistics to make all of the National Hire Service centres better than average. His plan to close the five worst performing (by his measures) had raised a storm of protest from the drivers and their families. Petitions were compiled; local radio stations were canvassed for support; even demonstrations in the centres of the affected towns were organised.

Paul, by now inured to people contesting his decisions, initially tried to ride the storm thinking that it would all blow over but, when it did not, he finally agreed to launch a national survey so that the views of employees, customers and the general public aloke could be collated. He designed it himself under the umbrella of his own survey company - rather egotistically called My Own Research Institute. Whether he would listen to or act on the results, he had not yet decided but he was certain that he would at least have an accurate picture of the true feelings related to the ten Hire Centres vying to avoid the threat of closure.

All the Managing Directors of the various centres went about urging their staff to fill out the surveys online with the idea that the centres with the most responses would be spared the axe. The hopeful survey responder was asked for his views on various aspects of the proposed closures and, to finish, Paul had inserted a compulsory field for the entering of their email address. This, he thought, would guard against people trying to respond more than once. The other safeguard was the entering of one half of the postcode but oddly, there was no further check of duplicity.

One of the drivers, hoping to help promote his particular branch and suspecting that anything designed by Paul would have a flaw, thought he would try entering a second reply - one from his work email address and one from his home one. No sign of an electronic block or reprimand sparked by his 'double-counting' appeared and so, as he could generate several more email addresses very easily, he tried his luck again. And again. And again.

After six attempts he became somewhat bored by the repetitive nature of the exercise but he reflected that if everyone did this it would skew the results of Paul's survey to the point of irrelevance but, knowing Paul, he also thought that pointing this out would do no good whatever so he held his counsel.

Paul looked at his little online world from his office and saw the survey responses roll on in, pleased that his project of gathering opinion was running so smoothly.