Seconds Wasted by Bureaucracy

So in my senior year of high school, my school enforced a policy in which they checked student IDs upon entry to the cafeteria during lunchtime. I was very unhappy about this measure, as I am of all such policies that take a step towards turning my beloved Stuyvesant into a minimum security prison.

Every time I had my ID (and its affixed class schedule sticker) checked at the door, I made it a point to very obviously time the poor teacher doing his job with the stopwatch function on my Casio, and then record the time wasted by the check in a notebook I kept in my pocket. The following is the data I recorded:

Date Time wasted (s)
10/782/2006 17
10/783/2006 Not checked
10/786/2006 12
10/787/2006 5
10/796/2006 18
10/800/2006 12
10/801/2006 18
10/802/2006 10
10/803/2006 10
10/804/2006 12
10/808/2006 15
10/810/2006 10
10/811/2006 9
10/829/2006 9
10/830/2006 8
Total time wasted by this draconian step towards the gaping maw (s) 165

Dates are recorded in October 2006 format; that is, the “day of month” is the number of days since September 30th, 2006. Days not in the table between 10/782/2006 and 10/830/2006 do not mean “not checked”—they mean that I didn’t eat lunch at the cafeteria on that day (I think).

As a warning, this post was useless, so those with time traveling capabilities will want to dial back 10 minutes to before they began reading this post.


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