Simple Sums Stump Daily Mail Hacks

[BPSDB]
In their eagerness to bash public sector workers here, both the journalist and the sub-editor neglected to do some simple arithmetic that would have shown they were writing nonsense.

The text of the story says that in July Portsmouth Council’s 4,500 strong workforce spent 572 hours on Facebook.

There were 23 working days in July so this means that on average each worker spent twenty seconds per day on Facebook. Banning Facebook is not going to make any noticable difference in productivity. Realising that this was nowhere near outrageous enough, a sub-editor inserted the word “each” in the headline, implying that each Portsmouth employee spent 572 hours on Facebook in July. That means each employee spent 24 hours and 52 minutes per working day on Facebook…

There must be a Time Machine in Portsmouth City Hall to allow the workers to spend more time than actually exists on Facebook.

Hang on, perhaps they come in on weekends as well! In that case they average 18 hours and 27 minutes each per day. Which does leave them a few hours a day to eat, shit, commute to and from home and have a couple of hours kip.

Edited to add: Sombody at the Daily Mail has obviously realised how ridiculous the headline was so the word “each” has now been removed. So we are left with the assertion that twenty seconds per day is an appalling loss of productive time. And that is assuming that those twenty seconds came out of work time rather than lunch-breaks.

The idiots responsible for this non-story should be sent back to school to do a GCSE in maths.

Tags: bad mathematics, Daily Mail