16 September 2001, 15:44 GMT

Gartner Group yesterday announced that their "Questionnaire usage" questionnaire had produced some quite startling results.

The questionnaire asked: "Do you fill out on-line questionnaires?"

Gartner yesterday announced that an incredible 100% of respondents answered "Yes" to this question.

This result has astonishing implications.

Gartner senior researcher Robbie Bowler explains: "Through almost sheer good fortune, we have stumbled upon an absolute holy grail of market researchers - the perfect demographic. This has never happened before, in our entire history of market research."

Bowler's colleague Alice Rabbity added: "Even more exciting is the fact that we can now target this same group, and be assured of 100% accurate replies, with 100% of all those polled being guaranteed to respond - there is absolutely no danger of the results being skewed in any way. You see, a proper sampling is one of the master keys to building a good survey. A poll could be skewed simply by having some people in your key demographic failing to respond. I truly believe that with this amazing breakthrough, we have achieved perfection - nirvana. This is Shangri-La, the domain of the Gods - utterly flawless, perfect, pristine..." She paused for a moment to scratch her beard and push her horn-rimmed spectacles further up her conk.

She then added: "I think now that some of the trickiest, most difficult to gauge enigmas can now be answered with amazing precision and accuracy."

"In fact," Bowler pitched in, almost breathless with excitement, "we have already put this new-found silver-bullet demographic to good use. We asked the exact same respondents if, given the hypothetical situation that Gartner Group opened up its entire knowledge base for free, would they be tempted to abuse the situation, and did they think it was a good idea?"

"Amazingly," he continued, "exactly one hundred percent of those questioned said that they thought it was a good idea, and no they would definitely not abuse such a move - for example by downloading and archiving as many articles as they can."

"It's the altruistic power of the Internet," Rabbity confirmed, sighing deeply. "My faith in human nature has been restored!"

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