AQMD survey?

In theory, anyone who works for a company of a certain size or greater in SoCal (or maybe all of California) has to deal with the yearly AQMD survey. This year it was called the AVR Online Survey and dangled off RideMatch.info. Whatever, it's stupid and every year it seems to get worse.

The survey has always wanted more information than I felt comfortable giving. This year we topped the charts. Yeah, I did it because I can't deal with hearing (again) from some shrieking HR dweeb who has nothing more important to do than tell me that I'm going to get fired because I've not completed the same idiotic survey (only worse) I've been filling in ever since EarthLink became big enough for the AQMD to notice (I'm guessing six years, could be more).

This years version was better and worse than last years.

It asked for a home address (I don't believe they've ever done before) and a bunch of other silliness. It asked for my regular (that's a nice joke) hours as they always do. It also asked for estimated miles one way which is pointless for me. I used the shorter route, even though I only used it for two of the four trips I mentioned.

The single biggest step back was using popups for all of the time based info. The second biggest problem was requiring time data for someone who was telecommuting. I can imagine someone creating a report based on when I didn't drive. Oy! How about this... I didn't drive into the office so my hours are irrelevant in any statistical report. You want something useful? Ask for additional freeway miles (or something similar) which I add from time to time when I go out to meet friends and family members for lunch while working at home.

End result? I spent 10 to 15 minutes playing with popups after my first submission failed (because user typed numerical data is somehow hard to deal with?), they have hourly data that makes little sense alongside everything else for the days I went nowhere and they failed learn anything about my route or trip time on the days I actually made the trek. The company is now happy. The state is now happy. Both have learned zero useful information.

The bigger lesson? If you don't know what you wish to learn, even one question is useless.