Nerd-dom
Cars and Hands
Originally uploaded by crume. I found a feature on my phone today that I had never noticed before, called "call timer." It lists the number of calls made and the total time. I don't know for how long it's been tracking this number, but it's rather interesting. I assume it's since I got the phone, and not since it last lost power, since the number is rather large.
If so, it means that in the last two years, I've been on the telephone 6,739 times, talking and listening for thirteen days, three hours and fifteen minutes. This averages slightly more than two and a half minutes a phone call. Assuming that this was also during a two-year period (approximately how long I've had this phone), this makes an average of 9 phone calls a day.
Looking at my eighteen most recent calls (eighteen because I got tired of writing them down and thought it a good enough representation), I see that the average length of them was four minutes and thirty-one seconds, which is higher than the larger average. Half of them were one minute or under, though, so I assume those were times when I phoned and got an answering machine and either hung up or left a short message. There was a high of 19 minutes, 55 seconds and a low of 11 seconds. Ignoring phone calls one minute or under, my call time averaged nine minutes, 23 seconds.
These eighteen phone calls also averaged nine calls per day. Half of the phone calls were outgoing.
I thought this was an interesting data analysis. I'm not sure why I did it. The whole thing was surprisingly quick to do (10 minutes, tops, including this write-up). Usually my blog posts take a bit longer than that.
What am I trying to say or do with this information? I'm not sure. I'm rather surprised that I've been on the phone that much. In some ways, it makes me unhappy that I've spent such a long time in the last 730 days on the phone (who knows how much of that was on hold or talking to answering machines) instead of talking to people in person. In other ways, I'm happy that I've had the opportunity to talk to so many people -- many of the people I speak to don't live near me. So that's good.
So, I ask you, how do you stack up? Take a look at your last 20 or so phone calls and see how much or little you've been on the phone. I'd be interested in seeing how everyone compares, then maybe make an average from there.