Back in High School I conducted some very scientific research to determine the average person’s attention span.  If you are wondering, it is about twelve and a half minutes.

You see, whilst attempting to listen to my teachers, I found myself cruising off to the Bahamas, putting duel exhaust on my ’66 Mustang, dating the hottest hottie in school, or slapping a game winning home run.  With all due respect to Duckie, Mr. D, Bubba,  Leeeeeeeeeee, The Frau or any of the other gifted educators I was truly blessed to spend quality time with each day, I frankly had a really hard time staying plugged in.

Anyway, I decided I would undertake this experiment to measure my attention span.  Since I figured I was an average person, if I could measure my attention span, it would serve as a worldwide proxy for all the average Joes or Gradock’s out there.  The test was quite simple.  I would go to class, write down the time the lesson began, and the moment I started my cruise to the Bahamas, I would check out the clock again, and write down the time, do a little subtraction and voila, I would know my attention span.   All well and good, but I realized quite quickly that by the time I realized I was daydreaming, I was either half way to the Bahamas,  I had rebuilt the carburetor, or if I was really lucky, ahem, saying goodnight to Miss Hotinsky…

After many unsuccessfully attempts to crack the code of my attention span, I did finally catch myself at the precise moment I was pushing back from the dock.  And then, a few weeks later, was successful again.  The result…. Twelve and a half minutes.  But you already knew that already.

This morning when I got up I was chewing over this whole bit of news I’ve been hearing about the House and Senate reconciling their two tomes; the nearly 2,000 page House Bill and the 2074 page Senate bill.  Besides scratching my head and other body parts, over their continued desire to frost those turds, I started to wonder, what was the longest book ever written?  Then I set out to do some more scientific discovery.

First I decided to count the words in the Senate Bill.  Easy enough; highlight the document, copy it into word, do a word count and presto.  Well I started copying that pig and after 10 minutes (approaching my maximum attention span) I bailed and copied everything I had into word which represented a whopping 397 pages, 114,000 words, or about 18% of the document.  I’ll spare you the higher algebra, but by my count the total document is about 594,000 words.  Applying the same math to the House Bill, assuming they cram about as many words on a page as the Senate, their bill is close to 570,000 words.  Collectively, nearly 1.2 million words.

According to Wikipedia the longest novel written in either the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet, is a 2.1 million word snoozer entitled Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry.  Never heard of it?  Me neither.  I perused the list of the top 15  loooooongest longest novels to determine if there were any on the list that average folks like me might recognize.  There were three.  War and Peace, topping the word scale at 560,000 words (never read it),  Les Miserables weighing in at a slightly lighter 513,000 words (saw the play), and Atlas Shrugged splitting the middle at 540,000 words (on my reading list but after writing this blog, maybe not).

The average American has an attention span of 12.5 minutes.  The average American with a high deductible health plan and a health savings account needs a couple of hours just to begin to understand the benefits of their insurance and tax advantaged HSAs.  The nearly 600,000 word piece of healthcare sausage created by the Senate is anything but average.  In fact, to most average folks, it’s downright insulting.  And here they are trying to do the Vulcan document meld with the Senate and House Bills.

Ladies and Gents.  If you can’t explain the sucker in 12.5 minutes to the average Joe, you lose his or her attention, and more importantly, their confidence.  ‘Nuff said.  Well, almost; if you have made it all the way to the end of this blog, congratulations, you just read 732 words.