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12 questions later, your life is a little shorter

Something for the Weekend, Sir? Gor blimey guv. I jus’ bin dahn the ol’ rub-a-dub for a pokey alright sparrah do us a lemon John.

Fret not, faithful reader. Be comforted that I have neither succumbed to Dickvandykitis nor do I have any compulsion to “do the old bamboo” – a suspicious euphemism if ever I heard one.

I am merely rejoicing in being told that I am 100% cockney, having successfully completed a painstakingly comprehensive study by the world authority known as The Internet, testing my cultural facility to speak incomprehensible bollocks.

How cockney are you? comprised 12 questions of unparalleled scrutiny, determining my ethnicity with such soul-searching conundra as “You refer to someone’s hair as (a) a Barnet, (b) an Enfield or (c) a Watford?”

I am particularly pleased in being recognised as a genuine Lahndahn cockney since I’m from Yorkshire.

Proper Lundunners who I know took the test came out with miserable results compared to mine. But then some of those questions were devilish: who’d have guessed what “Don’t kick me in the Consolidated Loan Ads” meant?

The trick, of course, is not knowing the answer but knowing how to answer it. If you get a feel for what the questioner expects, you can often calculate a probable answer without having to rely on anything so dreary as actual knowledge.

I’m reminded of my days at uni when miserable first-year psychology students would knock at our study bedroom doors in the desperate hope that we’d help them with a seminar project by answering a personality questionnaire.

Unfortunately for them, I’d seen all the questions before: my father, a clinical psychologist, had shown them to me when I was little. They were mostly based on an old Hans Eysenck test for psychopathic tendencies.

Do you clench your fists when frustrated? Do you notice yourself grinding your teeth in awkward social situations? Well, maybe you do, maybe you don’t. But once you guess the trick, it’s quite easy to skew the results in your favour.

My experience was that I’d only have to answer a few questions in psychopath mode before the psychology student’s eyes would begin to widen. After more of my answers, his scared eyes would begin darting around the room as if looking for butchers’ hooks.

Before the questionnaire was over, my interrogator would already be standing up and stuttering his gratitude in a squeaky voice while frantically gripping the door handle, ready to escape the nutter’s lair.

On one occasion, after one of these psychology tests, as soon as my door closed I heard the student’s footsteps immediately break into a sprint in his desperation to get away.

Looking back, the effect was the opposite of that demonstrated by the crap cockney test. The psychology test failed because it was filled with lots of obviously loaded questions. The cockney test failed because it didn’t ask enough questions, loaded or otherwise. If it had kept asking more, it would have caught me out eventually.

Deep learning algorithms prefer the latter, thriving on the sheer volume of data accumulated. Artificial intelligence can then be employed to weed out the anomalous irritants such as me who think they can play the system.

In a much weaker form, expert survey organisations mimic these approaches by asking the same questions over and over again, slightly rephrased. By the time I have given my opinion on a product in 20 different ways, it would become clear enough to the survey experts that I had never used the product in question and was just a competitor trying to hex the results.

So I have decided to choose the piecemeal approach. By giving out snippets of false information in small doses, I have a better chance of cocking things up.

Given that my web browsing choices are being used by the Illuminati to build a picture of my consumerist proclivities and thus further inform its application of mind-control on the masses, I hereby commit to participating in as many crap 12-question online quizzes as possible.

How healthy are you?

I am super-fit, didn’t you know? I ran five miles after writing the previous sentence. I ran another 10 after the last one, too.

How fat are you?

Morbidly obese, as it turns out. I stuff my face with pizza while watching daytime TV, which I record so I can watch it again in the evenings.

How sexy are you?

Too sexy for my shirt.

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How royal are you?

So royal, dahling. As inbred as they come. Ears ears, indeed.

How working class are you?

We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank.

How middle class are you?

The son of a clinical psychologist and a psychiatric nurse – what chance do I have of being anything else? My public schooling is a matter of record. I was born middle class and will remain so forever, without the slightest opportunity to improve myself.

How Yorkshire are you?

We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank.

How Scottish are you?

This is funny because I am a half-Scot with a gaelic name that Starbucks baristas are trained to misspell, yet I must be the Englishiest person you ever met. That said, I can do a decent Middenface McNulty impersonation. Hepmaboab!

How Viking are you?

My real name is Dabbsaxe-Thrubrayne and I have a tendency to attack monks, which will be OK just as soon as I move out of this monastery. Come to think of it, I can do a decent Wulf Sternhammer, too. Vill do, ja, Johnny?

How French are you?

On habitait pendant trois mois un sac en papier brun dans une fosse septique.

How IT are you?

A user calls to report a non-working printer. Do you...

(a) suggest they turn it off and back on again?

(b) tell them to log a call with buildings management because stationery falls under someone else’s cost centre?

(c) ask them to hold on for a moment and then go down the pub for the rest of the day?

How are you?

Fine, thanks.

Alistair DabbsAlistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He invites you to discover how effective you are at wasting work hours completing pointless online questionnaires which are just click-bait to sucker you into looking at irrelevant ads that you have no interest in and will never click on, ever.

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