Questionable values

I just came back from a 6-hour meeting with my group for one of my term papers. The five of us are working on a project about controversial ads in Singapore and today we met to collate the data of the survey we had conducted.

We sat at Hans near the national library, armed with a laptop and our 111 completed survey forms. Each of my groupmates was calling the values out for each question from their stack of survey forms. I was keying in the values and generating the graphs for our presentation next week. The problem was - we had too many questions. Questions on ethics, values, creativity, censorship and what not. It was an exhausting process to go through question after question and key in the values.

At first, I would say each question out loud, and each one of them would give me the values (values as in the number of people who 'strongly agreed', 'agreed', 'disagreed', etc. to each statement). After abour four hours, exhaustion kicked in, and I started shortening the questions to mere phrases, and finally, to just the keywords such as 'ethical', 'creative', 'moral', etc. Some of the survey questions had blanks for answers so if I got no response, I'd ask to confirm that there were no values for that field.

It was in the middle of this that one of my groupmates T, exclaimed a loud "Excuse me?!"

I looked up from my excel spreadsheet.

She was giving me a very indignant look. I was really puzzled.

And that's when I realised what I had just asked her.

"T, you don't have any moral values, do you?"