This past Tuesday was Valentine’s Day, as I’m sure you’re aware.  I suggested to Stephanie that we go out to eat that night.  She said it would be crowded, but I said we’d leave early and get there by about 6:00.  I mean, it was a Tuesday night, and no one gets off work for Valentine’s Day, and who likes to eat that early anyway?  Turns out a lot of people.  We got to The Olive Garden at 6:00, to be told there was a “130-150 minute wait”!  We decided to go next door to the Red Lobster, where the wait was only an hour, then we went to the Toys’R’Us nearby to pass the time.

Now I know what you’re thinking- Kip!  You are SO clever!  I mean, I bet you’re the first person to notice that Valentine’s Day can be abbreviated “VD,” an acronym most of us associate with “venereal disease.”  That is SO clever!  I mean.. wow!

While that is true, I ask you to please refrain from devoting your comments to telling me how clever I am.  I know all about it (I was there when I wrote it).

In other news, I mailed off the Nielson Ratings packets this morning.  If you’re curious how the system works, I’ll give you a quick rundown of the things I found interesting (see also Stephanie’s previous post on the same topic).

• They first contact you by phone, ask you a bunch of questions, the last being if you’d like to participate.  After you say yes, they tell you they’ll pay you fifteen bucks.

• Then they send you a TV Diary for each TV in your house.

• That $15 they send you is in cash.. like, a Lincoln and a Hamilton.

• The diary is a grid, with columns for each person in your house on the right.

• Recording in the diary can be a little tedious.  You have to record the channel call letters or name, the channel number, the name of the program, and who watched it.

• If a program was DVR’ed (as most everything we watch is), you have to list the date and time that it was recorded as well.

• Sweeps week runs from Thursday through Thursday.. so we had two Thursdays to record.  Makes sense I guess, since Thursday is the most watched TV night.

I enjoyed being a datum.  In fact, I generally do.  People will call me on the phone and ask me if I’d like to participate in a survey.  “I’ve been waiting my whole life for this moment,” I always tell them.  Well maybe not, but I should try to remember to do that next time.  It’s just refreshing to know that a dataset reflects me, because a lot of times you hear statistics and think “Where did they get these numbers?!”  Especially for something like TV, that matters, unlike irrelevant things like psychology.  However, I was disappointed that we were selected during Olympics week, as many of the shows I normally watch were either reruns or just not aired.  But there is a spot at the end of the diary for comments, and it asks you to list any shows you normally watch but didn’t get to during this week.

People can come up with statistics to prove anything.  Forty percent of all people know that.
  --Homer Simpson