Another fly in my statistical soup

While I'm on one about misleading statistics let me congratulate yell.com on a job well done. Your mailer landed on my desk today. Once I'd figured out where the copy was I saw that the average new business enquiries for businesses in our category of Yellow Pages is over 85 per month. Now we all know that over 85 means 86 but hey! 85 new biz enquiries is bloody good. So I read on. It seems the average of 85 was based on a survey of 3,000 UK adults per month (I'm starting to think we need a bigger ad in Yellow Pages)...over a ten year period. Excuse me? Why do I care how many new business enquiries people were getting in 1996? In a week that has been filled with shysters and snake oil salesmen, Yell you are a shining example of why Bill Hicks told anyone who works in marketing to go kill themselves.