世論 What Japan Thinks

It’s perhaps a meme (sorry for using that word; I dislike it, but it fits here) that has overstayed its welcome on the internet, with places like FAIL Blog documenting failure in pictures, or The Register with its slightly too swearie-word-filled Fail and You column, but it was the best way to headline this survey from goo Ranking on sensing that moment of defeat, to translate just a bit too literally.

Demographics

Between the 21th and 24th of October 2008 1,056 members of the goo Research online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.5% of the sample were female, 5.0% in their teens, 13.2% in their twenties, 28.4% in their thirties, 31.5% in their forties, 13.1% in their fifties, and 8.8% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.

My FAIL! moment that I often have is that once every two weeks is paper and metal rubbish day, the next or sometimes previous day is plastic and glass, so it’s going out to throw out stuff on the second day and realising that I’ve got the days back to front.

Ranking results

Q: When do you sense that moment of defeat? (Sample size=1,056)

Rank		Score
1	When I see the thing I bought offered at a discount the next day	100
2	When I see the other queues getting served faster than the one I’m in	96.0
3	When I remember just after paying that I forgot to pass over a discout coupon	72.5
4	When I forget I’d bought something and buy it again	64.3
5	When I realise after the meal I’d another dish in the fridge	54.9
6	When I’m the 999,999th or 1,000,001th customer	50.7
7	When I find there’s no toilet paper after doing the business	47.1
8	When I see someone wearing the same clothes as me	43.1
9	When I buy hot instead of cold or vice versa at a vending machine	41.7
10	When I get beaten by a fingertip to the last one in the shop	41.5
11	When I’m fooled by a link and get a virus	39.3
12	When someone gets on the train after me but beats me to a seat	38.9
13	When I realise after the meal I’d left a dish in the microwave	36.9
14	When I sleep until the evening on a holiday	36.5
15	When I get beaten by a fingertip by someone coming the other way at a two-way ticket gate	33.9
16	When I feel I need a poo just after a bath	32.7
17	When it stops raining right after I leave the house with an umbrella	31.9
18	When I mistakenly get on the local train instead of the express	25.3
19	When eating out with a group, my order only isn’t tasty	23.4
20	When I get the same present from two different people	22.8
21	When the colour of clothes, bag, etc that I want is not available, but buy the same design	20.4
22	When my eyes are shut on all my passport photos	19.8
23	When the person in front of me orders the last special cake, other food item in the shop	19.4
24	When thinking about giving up my seat in the train, someone older than me in the next seat beats me to it	19.0
25	When someone patents an idea I’d toyed with in the past	18.8
26	When I eat some high-class food but cannot understand why people rave about it	18.4
27	When I go to the toilet during a movie and miss an important scene	17.2
28	When I go to look why the camera self-timer hasn’t fired, and it does	15.2
29	When I go to a movie and realise I’d forgotten I’d seen it before	13.2
30	When a foreigner speaks to me in English and I reply in Japanese	11.8