Think of a number and multiply by 3120
The Herald has a story about a new app called TalkTo. Rather than you calling a business and waiting around for a possibly unhelpful response, you can text TalkTo and wait for them to call the business, ask your question and pass on the unhelpful response. Or, at least, you can if the business is in the USA or Canada — they currently wouldn’t handle Novapay or Qantas, the two examples in the story. The app obviously wouldn’t help for issues that require a dialogue, which includes essentially all the time I spend on hold.
Anyway, the statistics angle is that we apparently spend 43 days on hold during our lives. As a basic numeracy challenge: is this more than you expect or less?
The number comes from 20 minutes per week for 60 years, so it doesn’t apply to any actually existing people — 60 years ago, we didn’t have the same level of on-hold, and 60 years in the future there’s at least some hope that a larger fraction of businesses will figure out how to make a useful web page (or whatever the next communication technology but seven turns out to be).
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »