JULY 30 — I recently had a visit from the Department of Statistics (DoS). No, not the building, but its representatives conducting the Population and Housing Census.

These guys come round with a list of personal questions about the household, ranging from how much money you make, to how many cars you have, if you own the house you live in, and whether your pets attend yoga lessons.

I have often questioned the value of this exercise because it’s largely based on the assumption that everybody participating in the survey is answering truthfully. In fact, given the privacy issues involved, errors are sometimes introduced intentionally to prevent breaches of privacy. However, the end product is still assumed to be accurate and useful for the purposes of formulating policies and the like.

So, basically, inaccurate information is being used by the government and other organisations to make decisions that will affect me, but may or may not be in my best interests, and either way I have no say in the matter. Doesn’t sound like a good deal to me.

How do they convince people to participate anyway? With the increase in people trying to sell you stuff these days, I think most people have become very careful when people come up to them with questions.

To give you a bit of history (because people like it when assertions are backed by facts — even though they hardly bother to check), this change in social behaviour began in 800BC when insurance agents would ask random questions such as, “Are you afraid of death?”

This would then lead to the individual involved being taken through a list of deadly diseases, freaking out, calling his wife on his iPhone, then promptly buying a policy costing more than what his house, car, and dog would fetch at the pajak gadai. True story, no need to check.

So over the years, people have wised up and stopped answering questions. But the incredible thing is that the census people have not been affected by this at all!

They still come round, ring the bell, promise you they’re connected to the Bandaraya, and then ambush you with questions. Before you know it, you’ve given them all your personal information, and you’re sticking the little card they gave you on the wall outside your house, as instructed.

I think the reason people still do it is because the census only happens once every 10 years. So while you may have been left dazed and confused after the last one, while you may have considered the merits of the exercise and vowed never to take part again, 10 years is still plenty of time for you to forget all that and get duped all over again.

But it’s not something you should get too upset about because, for starters, we haven’t got much of a say in most things that occur in our democracy anyway. If you couple that with the fact that representatives from the DoS are always overly nice and believe everything you say, the census becomes a rare opportunity to have a bit of fun with authority.

This time around, I told them my mother was detained under the ISA for conspiring to murder the Prime minister’s goat, that my father worked at Zoo Negara massaging tapirs, and that we had 30 members of the Jemaah Islamiyah living in my house because we needed the rent money to fuel our addiction to heroin.

They jotted all this down carefully, thanked me, and gave me a card to stick on my wall. Can’t wait for the next one!

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.