I recently learned, while watching TV, that the average American watches 4 hours and 19 minutes of TV each day. I couldn’t believe it. Then, after watching the fifth one hour episode on Investigation Discovery, I was a believer.
Not wanting to be average, I decided I would watch no more than 4 hours and 18 minutes of TV each day. With an extra minute on the remaining 19 hours and 42 minutes of my day, I thought it would interesting to research a few more statistics. I typed ‘statistics’ in my search engine and discovered this fun fact:
US Census Bureau is shutdown
Directly below this bolded headline was their url, www.fedstats.gov/. I clicked on the url to find this url, http://outage.census.gov/closed.html, and message:
Due to the lapse in government funding, census.gov sites, services, and all online survey collection requests will be unavailable until further notice.
I’m still trying to understand how a lapse in funding results in websites shutting down. My guess is some ‘nonessential’ IT employee decided they would take this opportunity to make their job seem a little more essential. Al Gore would be pissed if he knew they were messing with his world wide web.
Fortunately, the United States Department of Labor’s website is still working – Note: Labor works – and I was able to review the American Time Use Survey. The first header read:
Working (by Employed Persons) in 2012
As I reviewed the rest of the Economic News Release I quickly determined they will need to add two additional categories next year:
1) Working (by Essential but Unpaid Federal Persons) in 2013
2) TV watching (by the Average Furloughed/Nonessential American)
I’m pretty sure that second category is going to skyrocket.
After all of this reviewing and determining, I was exhausted but, like 49.2 million other Americans (according to the CDC website – surprisingly, not closed), concentrating on things, such as this, is the number one reason for self-reported sleep-related disorders. Not wanting to get bogged down by the facts or lose any sleep, I decided to participate in the leisure activity that occupies most American’s time – watching TV. Based on my favorite phone app, Clock, I had plenty of hours left in my day to do so without skewing previous year’s data. So, good news Census Bureau, you can continue your furlough because from now on I plan to get my facts from a ‘shut down’ but syndicated source: The Facts of Life.