Tuesday, April 05, 2005
I don't want to go all Tayloristic on you guys, but I've always been really annoyed by the cell phone voicemail systems. I don't know if they all have this, but I'm constantly hearing "if you would like to leave a call-back number, press # now." Does anyone ever do this? Why can't you just leave your number on the voicemail like a normal person? The 99.9% of people who never do this have 4 seconds wasted every time they leave a message.
I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation* and estimated that Americans waste 600,000 man hours per day because of this useless 4 seconds. That's 600,000 hours we could be spending watching Desperate Housewives.
*I didn't have any envelopes so I used minitab and modeled outgoing voicemails as a poisson process with mu equal to 3 per day.
I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation* and estimated that Americans waste 600,000 man hours per day because of this useless 4 seconds. That's 600,000 hours we could be spending watching Desperate Housewives.
*I didn't have any envelopes so I used minitab and modeled outgoing voicemails as a poisson process with mu equal to 3 per day.
