Myths & Mysteries
Myths & Mysteries
April, 2003
This all started because my Current Boss is a firm believer in lunacy.
Working where we do, I found myself being somewhat in agreement with
her...
We worked for a company that contracted large quantities of computer supplies and services for a major midwestern metropolitan college of higher knowledge. The corporate project was in its infancy, and the customer was asking us for a lot of data on the operation. Former Boss Now In Greener Pastures wanted us to keep track of the number of calls each of us took here on the Computer Help Desk. Seeing as we wanted to justify our continued existence on campus, we kept records out the hoohah, and were able to whip up what they wanted pretty much on command.
Time proceeded through several iterations of Bosses and OverBosses, until last fall the immediate corporate hierarchy settled into the present configuration, and Current Boss (aka CB) assumed the reins of command. Naturally, during this entire extended period, we kept keeping records of this and that and the other (I sing the praises of the inventor of outboard USB multi-gigabyte hard drives...), and individually we kept our own little logs of certain things.
One day not long ago, CB was commenting about how in her day, it always seemed that when it was a Full Moon the Help Desk Phone would never stop ringing.(I'd heard of this scenario before...some friends have worked security at a local hospital, others are members of law enforcement, and a fair amount of them are totally convinced that when the moon is full, mankind goes on some sort of mental bender and all hell breaks loose.) Now, CB's 'day' actually corresponded with mine, as I came on board to allow her a horizontal corporate transfer. My memories didn't include the retreats to the bunker every 28 days or so when Luna ruled mankind.
Being the skeptical type that I am, I expressed some doubts to CB in that our undergraduate community was capable of just as much idiocy on their own as when supposedly assisted by astronomical arrangements. I reminded her of some of our favorite horror stories...users who have been using their laptop computers for better than six months, but don't know where the battery is, or that the function key turns on the keypad embedded in the keyboard ("My computer types numbers when I hit letters...")...they believe the thing with the picture screen is the computer, and don't really know what the other box is...plugging/unplugging keyboards and mice while powered up (that'll smoke a motherboard in a heartbeat)...wondering if anything will be hurt because they poured a beer into the keyboard ("...rinse it out in the tub, hang it out the window overnight, and you'll be fine...")...the day someone set their doorstop on their laptop, not realizing that said doorstop was a 6" diameter 1" thick rare-earth magnet, which promptly wiped the hard drive clean (they were lucky it didn't suck the chips off the motherboard)...and on, and on, and on. With very little encouragement, we of the Help Desk will explain in detail why we believe USER is a four-letter word...but I digress.
CB wistfully expressed the desire to see once and for all whether we
really did get stomped with calls during a full moon. I reminded her that
I had my logbook, with my nightly call totals going back to October
'01. Also, being the astronomically inclined type that I am, I had lots of
astronomy software hidden on my machine. She brightened immediately,
and we kinda worked a deal where I'd work on this on my off time (no
money, mind you, but I could submit a suitably corporately anonymous
scathingly humorous article based on the data to a friend's online report),
but I'd have a valid reason to be around the job site after hours
piddling around "doing research for the Boss" on our middle-of-the-night
lightning-fast educational-network backbone Internet connection. You'd be
surprised at the amount of good literature that's out there on the
Web...I finally got to read Morgan Robertson's "Wreck Of The Titan", the
1898 book that supposedly foretold the 'Titanic' disaster
(
Okay, how am I gonna categorize this data? It took a couple of false
starts, but eventually I decided to make this as scientific as possible
(for reasons you'll read of later, this isn't saying much). Twelve lunar
positions were established -- the day before, the day of, and the day
after the New Moon, First Quarter, Full Moon, and Last Quarter. The
dates of all these positions were established with a handy little program
called Stig's Sky Calendar (
Now's the time to confess -- this little exercise in lunacy has so many
holes in it, it's entirely possible that both it and the Moon are made
of the same sort of Swiss cheese. There was no way to take into account
days off (my work week is Sun-Thurs), vacation time,
Spring/Easter/Xmas/semester breaks, shift changes (I work mostly nights during the school
year, and days during the summer), training schedules (I just listen,
the newbie logs the calls), and a couple other things that skewed the
data into another dimension. But what the heck, ya work with what ya
got...
Keeping in mind the mathematical theorem that constants never are and
variables never do, I began entering data. Slowly, a pattern looked to
be emerging. It turned out the pattern was more artistic than
mathematical, the way things worked out on the Excel spreadsheet. Feeling that
something was missing, I also correlated the data by day of the week.
Block by block, parameter by parameter, total by total, a 9-sheet Excel
workbook took form. I wasn't sure if this was Topsy found under a rock,
or Frankenstein's Monster that was built in the lab. But I plunged on
with the appropriate influence (that being George Noory's woo-woo
CoastToCoast AM radio show) playing in the background...somehow, it seemed
altogether fitting.
Finally. The summary page. With shaking hand, I highlighted the columns
and clicked the AutoSum button. The Man In The Moon must have approved
of my efforts, because it all added up. That alone is enough to
persuade me that the age of miracles may not yet be over...
The data came out as follows:
BY DAY OF WEEK:
Remember, these were my call totals only -- I didn't work Fridays 8
months out of the year, and the way the scheduling worked, I never worked
a Saturday. Other phone techs' totals would show different
arrangements.
Conclusions
So...did a Full Moon make things crazier here on campus? Not if you
believe the figures. The busiest MoonDay was actually the day after the
New Moon -- but the top five days were only separated by 1.155% (25 calls
out of 2166). The busiest day of the week was Monday, with a full
quarter of the calls we took, beating the next day by almost 5% (a 102 out
of 2166 call difference).
Mondays I can understand. Either things left running all weekend long
decided to go wonkus during that period and weren't discovered until
Monday, or things that were shut down decided to puke on restart. It's all
part of the perversity of inanimate objects. But things with the Moon
are so far down in the S/N ratio that it's tough to tell. The
traditional time (Full Moon) came in third...and it was beaten by the day before
the Full Moon.
So, what does it all mean? It means I had some time on my hands, and
the CB let me dink around after hours. Beyond that, draw your own
conclusions.
Dates Of Survey
October 15 2001 to February 28 2003
Lunar Positions
Day before New Moon
Day of New Moon
Day after New Moon
Same with FirstQuarter/Full Moon/Last Quarter
(twelve positions in all)
Additional Analysis
By day of week
Total Number Of Calls
2166
These five days out of twelve accounted for 49.861% of the calls.
Lunar Position
Calls
Percentage
Day After New Moon
224
10.342%
Day Before New Moon
222
10.249%
Full Moon
218
10.065%
New Moon
217
10.018%
First Quarter
199
9.187%
Weekday
Calls
Percentage
Sunday
192
8.864%
Monday
454
25.161%
Tuesday
443
20.452%
Wednesday
494
22.807%
Thursday
404
18.651%
Friday
88
4.062%