Survey techniques that could use improvement

A couple weeks ago, the CDC called and wanted me to take a phone survey, which would "only take about 10 minutes."  All right.  I know that this is a lie and it will probably take 20-25 minutes.  Fine, I'd like to help the CDC.  So, the first few questions have ordinal level answers, like "How many cigarettes do you smoke a week? A. None, B. 1 to 3, C. 4 to 10, D. more than 10."  And the like.  We get to "How many times have you tried chewing tobacco?" and I answer, "Never" and the interviewer starts to list out all the possible answers, and I repeat, "Never" to which the interviewer replies that they have to read all possible choices, to which I replied that I couldn't complete the survey under these conditions, as the conditions under which they wanted me to take the survey was wasting my time.


I can sort of understand the need to list out all possible choices for a nominal response; if they ask what my favorite color is, I could perhaps mistakenly answer "A. Blue" instead of "C. Yellow", but when the response is ordinal, there's absolutely no need to read out every single answer.  Case closed... but no, the CDC called back.  It took two minutes to explain to the nice interviewer what the problem was, but finally, case closed.  No, the CDC called back *again*.  This time I simply said I wasn't finishing the survey and hung up.


What I don't understand is why they don't have an online survey option.  An entirely automated call system could call you up, go through the necessary decision tree to get the right person in the house on the phone, then ask if you if you want a live person to administer the survey or take one online.  The live person choice connects you to one of their phone interviewers.  The online choice tells you to go to cdc.gov (or other short url) and enter your phone number, and the site then administers the right survey.  Put a button on the online survey that says, "I want to talk to a live person" that connects you at any time to one of the phone interviewers.  I can read faster than any interviewer can speak, it lets me take the survey on my time, they might actually get more interviewees whose time is valuable, and they can conduct more surveys with fewer phone interviewers.  It's really that easy!