Not Quite a Blog

I think I've told the world... but, if you don't know, here it is again: Chelle and I are getting married in a few weeks via a civil ceremony at the NYC Marriage Bureau. Michelle's parents, Pat and Dave, will be there and we're all pretty damn excited... yes, despite the fact that we've been together for 10.5 years.

Anyway, I wanted to comment a bit on the NYC Marriage Bureau's wait time estimates. They're not ideal. When we got there we were issued a sweet ass ticket:

It has a timestamp (1:36pm) and our number, 143, is apparently the old pager code for "I love you" (thanks jo!).

Then the waiting began. When we first got there, the advertised wait time was 39 minutes. During that time, the wait time went down to as little as 15 minutes!

All in all, our number was called at 2:44pm, for a total wait time of 68 minutes. What the hell happened? I don't know. I think what happened is that the wait time is calculated as an instantaneous difference between the timestamps of the most recent two numbers to appear on the screen, and then the three values for the A, B, and C number pools are averaged. Why would I think that? Well, when started A113 was up on the screen and there were periods where the A numbers would pop up very quickly. During this time the wait time would go from, say, 53 minutes down to 15 minutes very quickly. Also, there were times where the B and C numbers didn't change at all and they stopped calling A numbers... and the aggregate wait time value would fall again.

Whatever they're doing, it would be more accurate to take the ticket from the customer, calculate the difference between the current time and the timestamp on their ticket, and use that quantity... rather than when the numbers show up on the screen.

We'll be waiting for probably 2 hours in our finest to get married here in a few weeks, so I'll just add 20% to the wait time and use that as a low bar!

UPDATE: BenAdida points to this great xkcd comic that is oh-so relevant to this post: http://xkcd.com/612/