Wait a Minute!

How often have you heard this expression? How often have you thought about what it means in money? Say you are an electrical engineer making $80,000 a year. And you work for pay 1,800 hours a year. That means 75 cents a minute! You waste $3.75 when you wait five minutes for an elevator, bus, train or whatever.

Granted, it might not be your money if you do it on company time. But shouldn’t your time off-work be worth the same to you as your time is worth to your employer. Besides, your "cost" to your employer include your workplace, health insurance, vacation time, etc., the value of which often amounts to the same as your salary. If you work as a consultant, what you charge your clients is normally about three times what you take out as salary.

So now your five minute wait is a waste of $7.50 to $11.25! Every one of your minutes are worth between 75 cents and $2.25.

New Yorkers must have calculated this long ago ( the way they are running from place to place. Isn’t it time that we consider the value of our time in other areas? Even waiting 40 seconds for a traffic light to turn green "costs" you 50 cents to $1.50. Then start thinking about the millions of people waiting for green light at a dozen crossings each day and we are talking millions of dollars a day.

I have told Mayor Giuliani that his anti-jaywalking campaign will cost New Yorkers $2.5 billion a year!

The other day I had to spend an hour to adjust our clocks and watches back to standard time. This includes the time pieces in three computers, one microwave oven, two VCRs, one camcorder, two medical instruments, three alarm clocks, two wall clocks and four watches. $45 of my valuable time. And I do not like daylight saving time in the first place. Humans have adjusted over thousands of years to get up at a certain time in the morning. Switching back and forth between daylight savings time and standard time gives me something like jet lag. Has someone ever calculated the cost to the nation? Supposedly, we save in energy, but how much?

It should be noted that some equipment and computer programs automatically converts between standard and daylight saving time. Thus saving us the time spent on conversions. 

Bertil Lindberg 

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Last revised July 16, 2003.
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