The Brother P-Touch: Organized Lying To Dodger Fans

This isn't quite a "Things I Don't Understand," as I now understand how the Brother P-Touch (a line of handheld label-printing machines) can make such an outlandish claim on its radio commercial (which has played through the Dodgers' radio broadcasts this second half of the season).

In the advert, the person being "interviewed" (as if it were a radio interview show) notes that office disorganization causes a horrific amount of lost productivity, citing some study that says vanilla points like "people don't like a disorganized workplace" and "people believe a disorganized workplace is unprofessional." But the clinching point mentioned in the ad—the point that elicits gasps of shock and awe from the "studio audience," is this one:

So let me get this straight. According to this "white paper", each worker is losing an entire work week looking for misplaced items. This is absurd. I mean, my desk is a frickin' disaster zone, with stacks of papers and half-empty coffee cups everywhere, and I sure as hell can find anything I need in two to three minutes' time--and I don't need a label machine to help me find it. I don't even know if it would take longer than a couple of hours to go through my entire office, desk drawers and file cabinets and credenzas and bookshelves included. How could one lose an entire WEEK?

What items could these workers possibly be losing such that they're spending time looking for this lost item? Their special pencil with the troll doll on the end? Their red stapler? The percentage key on their keyboard? Their religion? There simply aren't enough proprietary objects that could cause the loss of a week's worth of productivity.

But read the fine print on their website, one can quickly glean how they get to this preposterous claim (bold emphasis mine):

Formula: Census: # of people who identified themselves as a full-time management, professional sales or office professional. […]

Average minutes per day spend looking for misplaced items in the office and on the computer: 19

Aha. The "time spent looking for misplaced items" includes people looking for things on the computer. Sort of like…googling for a website. Or locating a soft copy document. In other words, things that can't be better located with a stupid laminated label-making machine.

The "cost of disorganization" is miniscule relative to the cost of shoddy "research" and advertising ridiculous, unsubstantiated claims. Go stick a label on that, Brother.