My 10-month-old daugh­ter is sick, cough­ing, con­gested. Con­fused. She doesn’t under­stand why my wife and I don’t just fix it. It’s impos­si­ble to explain that we would use this awe­some con­ges­tion power on any­one but her. So, lots of sooth­ing, lots of grumpy dia­per changes, lots of naps inter­rupted by vicious chok­ing on mucus. She finally goes to real sleep late in the evening.

Par­ent free­dom time! How­ever, said par­ents are absolutely exhausted. Need to do some­thing before sleep, though. We’re not parent-bots.

“Hey, you know what would be great?”

“No, what’s that?”

“Want to do some dailies? Just to relax for a few min­utes. Get you closer to that rep sword.”

“That sounds good!”

Ok then! Let’s log on for fif­teen min­utes or so and do some dailies.

Position in queue: 429
Estimated time: Calculating...

The cal­cu­lated time ended up being twenty-four minutes.

Back in the days when we were sit­ting down for a three or four hour block, a twenty-four-minute delay was just a minor irri­ta­tion. But now, we’re (try­ing to) log on for a half-hour or even ten-minute ses­sion. A twenty-four minute wait? It’s the whole thing.

This got me thinking.

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