A New Game...

[venta]

Ring a large company, preferrably one with an incomprehensible 'on hold' system. Ntl are good for this. Ask some question that requires them to look something up, call someone else, organise a payment...

Count how many times they say "bear with me".

Divide by the number of minutes you spent actually talking to a real person. And get a Dave-Gorman-style bear-with-me-per-minute factor.

A conversation with Ntl the other day trying to persuade them that our bill was wrong (on the grounds that the figures on the bill didn't add up to anything like the total they'd added them up to) yielded an impressive:

7 / 13 = 0.536 bwmpm

Comments

Statistics ?

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I think an argument based on statistical significance might be the most appropriate. Assign some nominal probability to someone saying "bear with me" in 1 minute of normal conversation, then calculate the significance level of the number of BWM you get in the sample under analysis.

That way, a consistently maintained 0.5 BWMPM over a ten minute conversation would be far more impressive than 1 BWM in a 2-minute conversation.

I tentatively recommend 0.001 BWMPM as the ambient BBWMPM (Base Bear-With-Me Per Minute) of this part of the universe.