25 November 2025

FedEx – false precision

It is a bit ironic that FedEx goes to the level of precision to say the delivery window starts at 10 minutes past 9 (not your standard 9 o’clock) and then admits it will be somewhere within a wide range of 4 hours.

Interestingly, if they had said somewhere between 9 and 1 and it had shown up at 1:05, I would not have minded at all. Now that it has set my mind to 9:10-1:10, if it shows up at 1:15, I am going to have a vague feeling that they let me down!

I was reading this somewhere else about how numbers have odd precision interpretation. “It will take me 4 minutes” or “It will take me 6 minutes” conveys a far higher precision than “It will take me 5 minutes”!!

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