People who do in-home stuff for us don't think our time is nearly as valuable as theirs, which is why they give us big windows instead of specific times, as in: "Yes, we can have someone there between noon on Wednesday and 2 p.m. three weeks from now." But out time is worth something:
Waiting for the cable guy isn't just frustrating, it is also extremely expensive: A new survey has found that waiting longer than usual for in-home services like cable repair and Internet installation is costing Americans $37.7 billion per year.
The survey was conducted by Zogby, at the request of mobile workforce solutions firm TOA Technologies, and looks at both the impact to the national economy and to the individual businesses that force people to wait for their arrival.
Thee bogus stories attempting to quantify the overall cost of something should always be viewed with skepticism. The last one I remember tried to calculate how many billions people doing personal stuff on work computers were costing their companies. For this particular study, 1,000 people were interviewed about how much time they waited for in-home service over the past year, then their estimates for how much it cost them in salary were extrapolated outward to the entire workforce. Not exactly a precise calculation.
But it's tempting to want the number to be right, because waiting for those guys is one of the most frustrating nuisances of modern life. Adding up the time spent waiting for everything -- TV, cable, Internet, phone, the furnace, the plumber -- can be the equivalent of three or four days in some years. And it's completely unproductive time. It's almost impossible to get anything meaningful done when you're so consumed by waiting for something.
Let's add a couple of other things to the "billions in costs" list for study: the time spent in doctors' offices because they insist we arrive precisely on time even though it will be at least a half hour later before they actually see us, and the time we're stuck at home when you need to be at work or stuck at work instead of being able to get home because the auto shop miscalculated by a day or two when estimating how long the repairs would take.
