Please tell me. I’m not angry, I’m just curious.

Is there anything left in the world, anything at all, any tiny bit of our lives, this planet, the universe, the multiverse, anything, anywhere that doesn’t generate a customer satisfaction survey?

I imagine dying, shuffling off this mortal coil by maybe collapsing into my porridge in the old folks home, ascending to the heavens where I wake in white room. First thing that happens, a question lights up “How did we do?”

As dying is something I expect to do only once it’s a bit difficult to compare with other occasions.

I’m fed up with it.

You can’t even come out of the toilet in your own home without being asked to press a smiley face, serious face or sad face button.

Last week at the theatre, in the interval, this was the interval mind you, I was attacked by a man wielding a hefty TV camera trying to interview me about what I thought of the show for the company’s own You Tube TV Channel. I told him it was a bit difficult to say as I hadn’t seen it yet.

This tiny detail was waived aside and the onslaught of interrogation continued. This was the first even for me. I was being invited to feedback on an experience I hadn’t yet experienced.

Amazon, Trip advisor, Google Reviews and on and on, we are surrounded, everything is reduced to a 1 - 5 star rating. Our lives, our deaths, our morning cereal, from the profound to the trivial, from the weighty to the whimsical we are sodden with surveys.

And where does all the information go I wonder? Is there some huge bucket in the sky where all the stars are thrown after they have been awarded. Some great vat of discarded human judgement? An ever growing butt of judiciousness creaking with the strain of worthless testimony?

Maybe one day it’ll be full up. And as the stars continue to be thrown in, gradually the great flagon of approval ratings will overflow and the stars we’ve awarded will gently rain down upon us, and people will feel the gentle comforting sprinkle of love like a blanket of tenderness and it shall be good.

Or not. Maybe they will just fester and gradually decay, tired and worthless and old, their once shiny ebullience tarnished and torn, broken, discarded, their shattered remains dismantled, moribund, left out to dry in the sun.

We shall never know. Hey ho.

Please don’t judge me. I’m not angry. I’m just curious.