I always have a few things going round my head that I would really like to understand, things that occupy my thoughts somewhat meaninglessly but which I find to be of interest. I’ll see something or hear something and it will set my mind wandering. Every so often I seem to make some progress, perhaps have some blinding insight or make some discovery which draws me ever closer to the truth only for me to lose hope a few moments later.
One such thing of the moment is how do you measure the weight of the earth which is presumably dependent upon its gravity? Without gravity would it weigh anything? As meteorites drop from the sky and make the world heavier does this increase, however slightly, the gravitational pull of our planet and, if so, does this make me a little heavier? I think about the pull of the earth on the tides and assume that the water lifts up because it’s fractionally lighter and the earth has less affect upon it. If so, does the moon make me lighter when it is overhead and will I be able to reach my target weight when it is in alignment with the sun?
Or how about when you are driving down the motorway, is there one of the lanes that will give you the shortest journey and if so which one? Sometimes I think that they are all the same and that with all the twists and turns any savings that you make on left hand turns will be lost through the right hand turns. What you gain on the swings will be lost on the roundabouts. This is clearly not true of an orbital motorway like the M25 where the lane furthest from the city centre is obviously the longest. Having cogitated on this for some time I’m pretty sure that the shortest lane will always be the one nearest to the central reservation, my logic being that this must be closest to the straightest route but I may well be talking about millimetres but I cannot be certain.
The thing that really has me puzzled at the moment though is something much closer to home, is work related and no matter how hard I think about it it just does not make any sense to me. What is happening is that users contact our ICT Service Desk with problems and we log things that have gone wrong as calls on the software. These are then fixed and the calls closed. I have been monitoring the rate at which calls have been opened and closed for many months now and while the overall rate has fallen (which is good) the rate at which we fix things is almost identical to the rate at which we log them. The more calls we log the more we fix and the less we log… well you get the picture. It’s almost as if you can predict how many calls will be fixed when you know the number that has been logged. Shouldn’t our ability to fix be relatively constant even if our demand is more flexible? With all the resource that we have and all of the variance in the system I just cannot get my head around why this happens.
Please, if you are someone clever, can you help me out with the answers?
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 
So you’re saying that for example; the service desk fix the same % of calls that come in whether they log 4000 or 8000 calls a month? Is that what you mean?
If we log 300 calls, we close 300 calls. OIf we log 400 we close 400 and 200, 200. Weird.