Two Minutes Is Not a Duration: The Announced Remainder as a Denomination of Outstanding Work, with a Discharge Ratio Estimated from 1,904,772 Countdowns

The washing machine says two minutes. Ten minutes later it still says two minutes, and the machine has not made a mistake. An announced remaining time is not a prediction of elapsed time at all, but an exact statement of outstanding work, denominated in minutes and not measured in them. On this reading the residual that the estimation literature has spent eighty years trying to eliminate is not error but an exchange rate. Instrumenting eleven classes of domestic appliance and timing completion from the mains current trace rather than from the display, we record 1,904,772 countdowns and estimate a single discharge ratio, $\delta =3.72$ (95% CI $3.68$–$3.78$): one announced minute redeems for $\delta$ minutes of clock. The ratio is invariant across manufacturer, task and operator, and across ten of the eleven appliance classes; it survives a concealed-announcement trial in which the display is suppressed altogether; and it holds unchanged for contact-centre wait announcements, construction contracts, and the intraoperative assurance that the procedure is nearly over. Two consequences follow. Completion is uniform over the discharge window, which is the exact content of the phrase any minute now; and the folk instruction to double a stated estimate is not folklore but a rounding of $\delta /2$. The estimate was never wrong. The unit was.