On Being Asked to Rate My Experience

I have been asked, on a scale of one to ten, how likely I am to recommend a bottle of water to a friend. I bought the water at a petrol station, at night, in a condition of ordinary thirst. We did not, the water and I, form a bond. And yet here is a small survey, arrived by email before I have even finished the bottle, asking me to appraise the relationship and to be honest, because my honesty helps them improve.

We are, all of us, now perpetually mid-review. No experience is permitted to simply happen and then be over. It must be scored, ideally while still warm, on a scale calibrated to no known human feeling. Was your visit to the doctor a nine or a ten? Would you recommend your recent surgery to a friend? A machine at the airport, at the exact hour of my deepest exhaustion, invites me to press one of four buttons, ranging from a green delighted face to a red devastated one, to summarise how I feel about a corridor. I had never in my life held a view about a corridor. I hold one now. It is not printable, and there is no button for it.

The genius of the thing, as I established last spring while declining to rate a sandwich, is that it flatters us into believing our opinion is wanted, when what is wanted is our compliance, quantified. They do not want my experience. They want my experience rendered as a number, so that it may be averaged with the numbers of strangers into a figure that means nothing and is printed, proudly, on a sign near the door.

(Once, in a fit of sincerity, I used the free-text box. I wrote three careful paragraphs on the true nature of the encounter, its small kindnesses and its one real failing. I received, in reply, an automated message thanking me for my two stars.)

And here, against all expectation, is where I turn. For I have come to believe the survey is the only thing in modern life that still asks me how I am. No one else does. My friends assume; my telephone presumes; the world hurries past. But the water company, alone among them, pauses, and asks, on a scale of one to ten, how I really feel. It does not want the answer. But it asks. And some nights, reader, that is more than anyone.

I gave the water a nine. I withheld the tenth point on principle, so that it would have something to strive for. We all need something to strive for. The water is, I am told, working on itself. So, per my last email, am I.

Firmly, and until further notice,

Mr Fickle