I stumbled upon this article: How Microsoft And ThyssenKrupp’s Elevator Tech Saves Office Workers Years Of Waiting. The first paragraph reads:
A Columbia University study found that New York office workers spent a collective 5.9 years riding in elevators—and 16.6 years waiting for elevators. And that was just in 2010.
What?
In 2010, how many office workers only waited 16.6 years for elevators in 2010? There is just not enough information in this statement for it to make any sense. The link to the study points to this PowerPoint about elevator scheduling:
There is nothing in these slides that I could find that suggests 16.6 collective years of waiting for some undetermined number of New York office workers.
But it must be true, as everything on the Internet is.
Norbert, it’s a well known fact that 68.7% of statistics are made up on the spot 😉
16.6 years seems low to me. Assuming 50,000 workers each waiting 5 minutes a day for 260 work days in 2010, I came up with 123.7 years:
50000 * 5 * 260 / 525600 = 123.668
(a year has 525600 minutes)