Eight Days a Week

A press release arrived in my inbox a couple days ago in which a CEO, facing a major change in his line of business, promised to continue to work for his customers 24x7x365. I was impressed. It's not every day that a company vows to accelerate its customers to a high fraction of the speed of light relative to the Earth to squeeze seven years into the space of one. What's more, many companies have the same capability. I worry about the fabric of reality, already stretched by firms impacting operations and effectuating paradigms. Our frame of reference will be stretched, snapped, and broken. For details on repair, consult How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

• [hashashin]

  Shouldn’t the title be: “49 days a week” if we’re talking about expanding your workweek by 7x?

• [PlasticSkullGoblet]

  Even if you ignore the math and take it in the intended spirit, shouldn’t it still be 24x7x52?

  • [Anonymous]

    Congratulations, that is the joke. 365/7 = 52 (.14285714)

    • [PlasticSkullGoblet]

      Thanks for stating the obvious, Anon.

      I’m saying: the wording “24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year” is common. So even when not represented as a bad math equation 24x7x365, why don’t people say it “24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year?”

      If you google both phrases in quotes, version 365 has like 9 million hits, and version 52 has only like 58K.

      It seems like a natural progression to keep expanding the scale of container (day contains hours, week contains days, year contains weeks) instead of the way we have come to commonly say it (day contains hours, weeks contain days, year contains days too).

      Isn’t it a nicer progression to go 24 to 7 to 52?

      • [SamSam]

        That’s still… exactly the point. The post is relying on the assumption that we all see that it should logically be 24/7/52.

        The fact that more people seem to say 24/7/365, per your googling, means that people use phrases idiomatically, and could care about us language/math geeks snickering at them. Anyone want to bring up “could care less?”

        • [Ugly Canuck]

          No. Make that Hell no.

        • [Anonymous]

          Sure: “could care less” makes perfect sense because it’s sarcasm.

        • [MattB]

          I don’t think that’s intentional sarcasm.

          And SamSam #12, there’s a difference between speaking idiomatically and not thinking about what you’re actually saying.

• [Boba Fett Diop]

  This reminds me of an episode in The Ballad of Halo Jones, an early Alan Moore comic. Halo is sent to fight on a high gravity world, in which time on the surface slows down to the point where a battle lasting several minutes actually takes several weeks or months at Earth gravity. “Don’t get too excited,” she is told, “you’re only getting paid for five minutes.”

• [Anonymous]

  Bah I bet someone will attempt to out do this by saying they will work 25x8x366, ala working at 110% to be there for the customer!

• [retchdog]

  Maybe he’s admitting that his company won’t last more than seven years.

• [Michael Leddy]

  There’s even 25/8. That is dedication!

• [Brainspore]

  Maybe he meant 24 minutes an hour, 7 hours a day, 365 days a decade.

• [Anonymous]

  Why not 24x7x4(approx)x12?
  24h a day
  7d a week
  4w a month (approx)
  12m a year

  • [Nelson.C]

    The rhetorical Rule of Three.

• [Anonymous]

  not to encourage innumeracy, but maybe it’s not an equation, but a contracted numeric phrase shorthand thing. I propose writing it thusly 24x(7 OR 365). or like this “ALL THE DAMN YEAR”. the implication of sleep deprived CEOs is more troubling than the textual ambiguity.

• [Marching Mice of Mu]

  In any case, it sounds like he’s turned the company around 360 degrees.