Interesting Facts

It seem that we Brits don't like to be kept waiting. According to research by Interparcel we get grumpy very quickly if we are forced to wait for any length of time. (It seems we will only wait 5 minutes at a bar before walking off, 13 minutes for a delayed train and no more than 10 seconds for a web page to load. It seems strange for a nation renowned for its ability to form an orderly queue, but if you read this, I applaud your patience in waiting for it to load.)

Well rip off Britain gets even worse on the disclosure that people in the UK spent around £56 million calling government helplines. (According to investigations by the Public Accounts Committee, people in the UK are being charged premium rate to access certain government departments.  They also take too long to answer. Most departments have no targets, despite an industry standard that calls be answered within 20 seconds, but of course there's no real incentive to answer quickly, as the longer they can keep you on hold, the more money they make. Of the 208 million calls made in 2012/13, some 63% were made to higher rate numbers at an estimated total cost of £56 million.  These included calls to the Department for Work and Pensions, the inquiries and complaints line of the Student Loans Company, and sickeningly to helplines for victim support and the Bereavement Service. It's like something out of Despicable Me.)

Under new guidelines a train is considered "late" if it arrives more than 59 seconds behind time. (In the past, long-distance trains on British rail network were only considered to be late if they were 10 minutes behind time. So, how late is late?)

The world's official timekeeper, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) in Paris, decided to prolong 2008 by one second. (We all know about leap years, which occur once every four years because it takes 365 days plus six hours for our planet to complete an orbit around the Sun, but seemingly leap seconds are added on a strictly at need basis, because satellites orbit at speeds calculated in miles per second, and the Internet, (GPS) global positioning systems etc all need to know exactly what time it is. So the countdown to 2009 went something like this: "...3, 2, 1 and a half, 1... Happy New Year!")