Les Bonnes Choses

With all the biller notifications I've been doing lately, I've been in a considerable number of phone queues in the past week. Without exception, each wait has been interrupted by a message indicating that the call center is "experiencing a higher than normal volume of calls". This is not the first time I've called many of these numbers either, and I've heard the refrain before. To say that a particular volume, or rate, of calls is normal is to say that it is the average. To calculate the average rate of phone calls at the call center, one would sum the number of calls received over the period, and divided by the period. If, however, it subsequently becomes customary for calls to trickle in at a greater rate, the average (or normal, if you will) call volume will also increase. So either people are calling at an ever-increasing rate (and thus the instantaneous rate will always be "ahead of the curve"), or else the more appropriate phone queue interruption should say something to the effect of, "sorry, we don't feel your time is important enough to justify us spending the money to sufficiently staff our call center. Your patience is both appreciated and obligatory." Hearing this message is most infuriating when you've called a long-distance number.

So, that's my lesson on Calculating the mean. Today's bonus lecture is entitled Correlations: implied causality and zero correlations. There's an ad on the radio for Sleep Country Canada, where Christine McGee talks about supplying the Canadian olympic team with Serta mattresses. She finishes by reminding you that, whenever you see a Canadian win a medal, they slept on a Sleep Country Serta mattress the night before. The implication, of course, is that the mattress had something to do with winning the medal. Well, yes, all of the medal winners did get a good night's rest on your mattress. But so did the losers. In fact, if you really want to talk numbers, there will be far more athletes who slept on your mattress and didn't even make the finals than those who make it to the podium. Sorry, Ms. McGee, the numbers don't lie: Sleep Country Serta mattresses cause you to lose.

...And that's what it looks like when statisticians get catty.