ee163cz (04/18/83)
Gumby Surveys Ltd. presents.....
The Results of the Great Pocketknife Survey
------------------------ Survey ---------------------------------------------
1: Age? (yours, not the knife's)
2: Sex? {if (!strcmp(ans,"yes")) unlink(reply);}
3: Occupation? (approximately)
4: Do you carry a pocketknife?
5: If so, what generally do you use it for?
IF (ANS.EQ.14HCUTTING THINGS) GOTO /DEV/NULL
------------------------- Results -------------------------------------------
This got a total of 78 responses (as of this morning); 77 answered one
or more of the questions, and one accused me of silliness in net.general
(he may have been referring to the Tolkein Ring Network).
The following statistics do not include my own answers (listed later).
Question #1: age.
The mean was 28.093 years, standard deviation, 6.8231,
lowest 13, highest 47. Three respondents did not give their
ages, and one said "yes".
Question #2: sex.
64 male, 6 female, 2 yes, 3 unspecified, 2 other.
Question #3: occupation.
Quite a variety; mainly computer types and students.
I wonder why. There was no obvious correlation between
occupation and carrying or not carrying a pocketknife.
Question #4: pocketknife carrying.
62 yes, 11 no, 4 "sometimes" or "in the glove compartment".
Two of the six women keep pocketknives
in their glove compartments. Of the "yes" answers, seven
had some sort of emphasis ("YES!", "of course!", etc.).
16 respondents specified Swiss Army knives. With all my
fine statistical training (none) and finite time, I do not
observe any great correlation between pocketknife carrying
and the answers to the three previous questions.
Question #5: uses. ("Was willst du noch heut' mit dem Schwert?" -- Mime)
Many. One of those who does *not* carry a pocketknife
uses it for not cutting things; another uses it for cleaning
her fingernails. Of those who *do* carry pocketknives:
# using use
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
33 screwdriver
30 opening packages/envelopes
21 can/bottle opener
21 cleaning/trimming fingernails
1 cleaning/trimming toenails
15 cutting food
14 cutting things
7 "cutting things" (2 remarks about FORTRAN case sensitivity)
8 general-purpose tool
3 fixing things (e.g. a VAX 11/780)
1 coaxing things
6 self-defense (hypothetical)
1 self-defense (actual)
6 cutting rope/string/etc.
5 stripping wire
3 sharpening pencils
3 picking teeth
3 cutting things out of newspapers/magazines
3 disturbing people
2 picking locks/jimmying doors
2 IC puller
2 fiddling with
2 threatening airport security guards/setting off metal detectors
1 completing electrical circuits
1 counterweight to wallet
1 protecting leg from keys
1 whittling
1 mushroom/flower/etc. gathering
1 carving pumpkins
1 manipulating DIPswitches
1 trimming weeds
1 carving on tables of pizza joints
1 plumb bob
1 prying things
1 pipe (smoking type) reaming
1 dulling whetstones
1 puncturing inflated egos
1 deading Bluebottle
1 killing Norwegian Blue parrots
1 stabbing people and small animals to death
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Many of those who carry pocketknives have many uses for them. Many of
those who carry Swiss Army knives use the various accessories (scissors,
tweezers, etc.) much more often than the knife blades. Some mentioned
having trouble at airports; some reported *not* having trouble at airports.
Only one person mentioned whittling, and none mentioned carving initials
in trees. Truly, the old ways are dying out.
A few responses included suggestions. mcnc!jcw suggested that I
should have asked about blade length; cires!harkins suggested a question
about how long one can keep a given knife. Why didn't I think of those?
burdvax!hdj suggests that anyone who would use a pocketknife for self-
defense is looking to be killed. I tend to agree with that.
Disclosure time: as for me, I'm 23, male, an alleged CS student at UCSD
(during vacations, a "systems engineer" (mostly software)) and hacker,
and a confirmed pocketknife carrier. The knife that started all this
by setting off a metal detector (or by being in the same pocket as the
change that set off the metal detector) had a rather pointy 2" locking
blade; however, last Saturday (the day cires!harkins mailed his suggestion;
see above) it vanished, perhaps turning into a sock and escaping into
hyperspace. As of last Thursday, I have a Buck #505, with a 1.6" locking
blade. I mainly use it for cutting things out of newspapers and for defending
myself against anyone who attacks me armed with a sealed package. It's
also useful for cleaning my fingernails, occasionally stripping wire,
cutting tape (sticky & mag; sometimes magtapes need their mangled ends
trimmed), converting floppies to flippies (adding a second index hole
in the envelope), and many other things. Just last night I was using it to
cut tape on a PC board layout. I certainly don't think of my knife
as a weapon; I think my big heavy attache case would be more effective
for self-defense: it's big enough to use as a shield & heavy enough to
make a nasty blunt instrument. It also tends to be in my hand, rather
than folded up in my pocket like the knife.
As a concession to those who don't like to have personal information
such as age, sex, and knife-carrying stored in a computer, the original
data will shortly be moved to a filesystem mounted on /dev/you_know_what.
The letter containing the dastardly threat against the life of young
Bluebottle has been forwarded to the East Finchley Community Computer
Center, where it will reside in a cardboard-and-string PDP-8 until the
very End of Time Itself, or next Tuesday, whichever comes first.
Gee, this was fun. Maybe I should do another wildly unscientific
survey. I can think of lots of subjects: "What unusual things do you
carry around with you?", or "How do you pronounce the various ASCII
special characters?", or... I think I'd better catch up on my homework
first. If anybody else wants to use one of those subjects, go ahead.
-- F. J. Gumby
(Eric J. Wilner, sdcsvax!sdccsu3!ee163cz)