long time no post
hence posting something that i wrote a few months ago
every once in a few month, thinking of it as a detox, i deliberately detach myself from the internetwork.
so this time when i returned to my mailbox after a month, there was a pile of about a thousand unreads.
(un)fortunately, i have only 2 ppl who fwd all this to me, and it is anybody's guess that they work in and are paid by the IT industry. now this is what some fast math revealed
1000/2 makes an average of 500 mails per fwder in a month
for the sake of this analysis i'm assuming it takes them on an average 3 mins per mail, and it is a fair estimate, considering they read it through, then decide to fwd it, then populate the fwd list (it takes me more than 3 mins to just read those mails)
3 mins * 500 mails = 1500 mins = 25 hrs
now assuming an 8 hr workday, 25 hrs = 3 workdays!
that is 3 out of 20 working days a month, these ppl r going thru their inboxes, reading each n every mail, and judging whether it is good enough for me
that is 3 out of 20 workdays a month, they're working for me!
now thats not it, recently it came to my notice that there was a great mistake in these calculations. one of them mentioned in casual conversation that he fwds only the best, ie just about one in four mails that he gets.
that takes my estimate to 12 days!!!
now that i have your attention, i take this opportunity to thank their respective employers for paying them for this, and admit that i personally enjoy most of those fwds a lot. i hope they dont take this mail seriously, just like all the others, and keep those beautiful fwds pouring in
now if i had to tweak with these figures, i could've taken an easy estimate of 5 mins per mail, and that would've thrown the stats right upto 20 workdays a month, but i'm not here to make you IT ppl feel more pathetic about yourselves than you already do, which btw is the content of more than 25% of the fwds
also noteworthy is that a lot of these mails r common, and my mailbox simplifies my life by grouping them, so the total number without the overlaps is 1000.
now if i were to seperate them out, both of these employees of the IT industry, whom i'm very grateful to btw, would score way above 500 each, my guess is at least 20% mails r common, so 600 and it affects the whole analysis by 20%
so if u actually played with the numbers, assuming they fwded 600 mails each in one month, that they read 4 times the mails they fwd, with an average of 5 mins per mail, it can be proved that 24 days a month these ppl r doing this
and another observation, there's less characters typed in all of those mails put together by my dear friends, than i have typed in this single one
Cheers!
-Anshuman
