USA ’25 – Day One – Dodgy Stats

Just as the weather begins to change at home, we are off to warmer climes. Back in 2019 we did a combined trip to New York and Washington but felt that we hadn’t spent long enough in the capital so vowed to come back. Now we are here for a week.

Whenever we said to people that we were going on holiday to Washington, their first reaction was to say “DC?” like we might actively choose to spend a week in September on the Tyne and Wear!

Isn’t this what computers are good at?

Sat at the airport waiting for our flight I was looking for any way to fill the time. I settled on watching the over head screens as they rolled through a series of customer service metrics.

There were two columns: the first of which was the thing being measured, such as “number of bags crushed by baggage handlers” and “how much more is Pret charging here than at home?” The second column was titled “%” and, to make things even clearer, if the airport was doing well, the number was in green, and if they’d missed the mark, red. Simples!

I checked out the WiFi satisfaction rate and did a double take. It was shown as 4.09 and was in green suggesting that this was good. If 4.09% of people thought the WiFi was good then that was a terrible state and should have been in red, bold and flashing.

The answer was there in small print below the metric: “measured out of five”. WTF?! Isn’t this what computers are supposed to be good at? A conversion from x out of 5 to a percentage is incredibly straightforward: Number divided by five multipled by 100. I simply don’t understand why it could have been expressed in a consistent fashion which would have made the WiFi satisfaction 81.8%. Still it keep me amused for a while.

A what now?

We got off what was, quite frankly, a freezing plane to be greeted by grey and drizzle. If I’d wanted that, I’d have stayed at home! We walked out and were told that we need to be transported to the arrivals area. I had been expecting some sort of train but what I got was a massive, boxy, blue and white vehicle that looked like a cross between a bus and a spaceship. These were, I discovered, Mobile Lounges.

To quote AI: When Dulles opened in 1962, it was designed by architect Eero Saarinen to be a futuristic and efficient airport. The idea was that instead of building expensive, long terminal piers with countless jet bridges, airplanes could park on ” midfield” pads. The Mobile Lounges would act as mobile gates, shuttling people from the single, main terminal out to their plane.

They rise and lower to meet the level of the door of the aircraft, and it worked but did seem very odd. This was followed by an hour’s journey in a somewhat more conventional train that took us right into the centre of Washington, before we walked to our hotel.