The week in silly studies: People spend two weeks looking for TV remote

You slap your hand around on the couch, push your fingers between the cushions and reach into those gaps under the coffee table all while trying to rack your brain over the whereabouts of your television remote control.

Nothing seems to work at first and then, after a few seconds, you finally find it and change the channel so you don't have to watch that same annoying McDonald’s ad for the 19th time in the hour.

While it may only seem like a couple seconds here and there, that time really adds up.

A new study shows people spend on average two weeks of their lifetime looking for the lost remote, according to an article in the Telegraph. U.K. discount website netvouchercodes.co.uk questioned 1,000 people and found the average person spent 5.35 minutes per week looking for the clicker. That's more than 4.5 hours a year. The average life expectancy in Canada is 81 years, meaning Canadians would spend more than 372 hours — or 15.5 days — looking for the remote.

[ Last week's silly study: Most people quit their New Year's resolutions ]

The study also found men waste more time looking (18.5 days) compared to women (12.5 days). This is either because women just give up faster or actually find it faster.

But some parents can justify this amount of time looking. They blame their children for hiding it.

"Children are the worst for hiding the remote — once they get their grubby little hands on it, it can disappear for days," said one respondent in the study. "I have now had to resort to hiding the remote from the kids, the only trouble is I end up forgetting where I have hidden it."

No part of the study discussed how long people spend per week hitting the clicker trying to get it to work as they squeeze the last juice out of the batteries, or how long people spend per week looking for their keys or cell phone. If you combine all four of these over 81 years, my guess is you'd probably have to measure the time in years.

(Yahoo! Canada News photo by Jordan Chittley)

The week in silly studies is a feature that appears each Tuesday.
It is not intended to mock real science.

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