Do you hate being contacted by phone but feel okay about texting or meeting in person? I’m told this is a thing that affects young people more and is looked down on. But I wonder: is it actually reverting to humans’ natural type?
Once we could signal from afar or send written messages or meet in person, but the idea of meeting sort-of in person while still miles away from each other was an impossibility.
Maybe phone calls or online meetings are now being shunned because actually they feel unnatural? Anyway, I couldn’t find a fit with cars, so I didn’t manage to put this into a column.
One notepad entry for which I did think of a car angle still needs more research. When Ineos boss Sir Jim Ratcliffe took a stake in Manchester United FC, it was reported that he called people back into the office because fewer emails were sent on Fridays, when people worked at home.
That stat may be true, but it’s incredibly simplistic if it happened as reported. It’s possible that I write fewer emails when I’m not in the office, but it will be because I have several thousand words to write and people tapping me on the shoulder every 20 minutes isn’t conducive to productivity.
But I’ve thought – and this is why I need to bury my head in some stats – about how it relates to smart motorways. Some proponents of them say they’re the safest stretches of road in the country, despite how badly the public feels about them.
What they don’t say is how safe those stretches were beforehand and whether accident rates have gone up or down since.
Smart motorways were designed to ease congestion, so it stands to reason that they were first introduced on the busiest (and therefore the slowest and probably safest per passenger mile) bits of road. I will revisit this one, so it will stay in my notes app.
On stats: the Sherman tank. Some media outlets think it’s a winning argument to say pick-up trucks are a similar size to a Sherman. It’s not a winner. Truth is the Sherman was an incredibly compact tank, at just 5.8m long.
