Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Charting Rudeness?

I've been working on a little data collection project during WEP, and now that it's over, I'm dismayed and pleased to show you what I've been up to for the last couple of weeks.

During all of the WEP classes and lectures I had to go to, I've been keeping track of the number of cell phone rings each day.  This all got started when in the first lecture I attended there were at least 3 rings in the first 15 minutes of the lecture!  I don't know if people here realize how rude they are being, but oh man are they ever rude.

The worst part is that people would answer their phones and actually have hushed conversations instead of ignoring the call or leaving the room.

So here you go, cell phone rings per hour for WEP.  A few notes, I started on Saturday because that's when our work week starts and thus Thursday and Friday as our weekend have less or no data because I didn't have to go to lectures. 

 Also, the Sunday where there were 7 rings per hour was actually all from the same lecture.  This was an especially awful presentation so the big jump in cell phone noises doesn't surprise me.

Overall there ended up being an average of about 2.2 cell phone rings each hour and 114 rings in total over 13 days, which is more than enough to be annoying and certainly enough to be rude.  I'm really irritated and disappointed that there were so many distractions.  Are people so busy these days that they can't turn off their phones for an hour?

Even worse than the cell phones was the sheer number of people who showed up late, but that's not at all surprising and in fact is very common.  So common, that for my 9 am class this semester, only nine people out of 32 have managed to show up on time!

I'm just shocked.  What do you think, am I overreacting?

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