Salary Survey Extra is a series of dispatches that give added insight into the findings of both our annual Salary Survey and our smaller Salary Survey PLUS polls. These posts contain previously unpublished Salary Survey data.

With 2017 just around the corner and a mountain of data from the 2016 Salary Survey in the on-deck circle, it's time to empty our sack from October's Salary Survey PLUS about networking certifications. In particular, we're going to liquidate our supply of Not-So-Serious survey data.

The Not-So-Serious survey questions, now a proud salary survey tradition, are found at the end of each new Certification Magazine salary survey, whether of the PLUS or Annual variety. It's a chaser, a palate cleanser, a mood lightener — and it also gives us something fun to write about when we're doing week after week of these Salary Survey Extra reports.

A number of the Not-So-Serious questions from the most recent survey have already come up. But there are several that we hadn't gotten to yet, and we think it would be a crying shame to just leave you all hanging. So we took it upon ourselves to prepare a final report. (You're welcome.)

Some of the Not-So-Serious questions are silly, but others are simply off-topic. Not directly related to IT certification, perhaps, but nonetheless offering an interesting window into this or that tangential aspect of IT life.

For example, we all get certain perks from our employers. It's considered part of your overall compensation.

Our Networking Salary Survey asked each respondent to decide which of the most common employer-provided perks he or she would be least willing to do without. The largest single portion of respondents are not at all eager to relinquish their employer-provided medical insurance, but there was by no means a grand consensus:

We can certainly understand why medical insurance is at the top of the list. Especially in the United States, securing other means of addressing large medical expenses is a dicey proposition at best. On the other hand, who would rather be able to set their own working hours than, you know, get paid vacation? To each, her (or his) own, we suppose.

We also asked survey respondents a questions that directly bears on how we present the survey. For example, it's one thing to view a question with a long list of possible answers when your sitting at a desk looking at a full-size PC monitor, and quite a different experience if you're using a smartphone.

Some people did use their smartphones to take the survey, but not as many as you might think. The option du jour, by a wide margin, is the laptop computer (preferred by 58.4 percent of survey respondents), followed by the desktop computer (29.7 percent), the smartphone (8.1 percent) and the tablet (3.5 percent). (It didn't occur to us to ask whether you'd rather that we just call you at home, probably during dinner, and try get some answers that way.)

Sticking to the theme of personal device usage, we asked how survey respondent prefer to curl up with a good book. How do you read for pleasure?

We suspect that using the right snarky phraseology is a good way to bait some respondents into selecting a given option. Or maybe most people just aren't into e-books yet.

A good related question might have been, "When do you generally make time for reading?" For people who like to read while taking a break at work, the answer would probably have involved coffee, because yeah it would. We're not sensing an addiction problem connected to this next question at all, people.

Everyone gets a little run down at some point during a day at the office, right? So we asked what people do to get back on track:

Finally, we attempted to solve one of life's greatest riddles by appealing to the philosophical bent that most IT workers probably haven't exercised since their freshman year of college. Once and for all, what does happen when a tree falls in the forest and no one is around: