CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@seldo Though, to be clear, most income tax has already been deducted beforehand by the employer.

@seldo In The Netherlands you do have to file taxes (with some exceptions), but most information (at least regarding income, mortgage and bank accounts) is already filled in.

@bellinghman @kevlin I have worked on transactional emails and push messages that communicate this type of information to users. Communicating time ranges like this, even with the "fake" precision is the easiest to understand for most people. From a business perspective, it also prevents unnecessary calls, and complaints, to customer service.

Being more vague and less specific, even it's mathematically more correct, is not "better", neither for the customer nor the company communicating it.

@kevlin Another reason for it being wide, is if they can't plan/allocate ahead in which specific delivery van/delivery route it will be put for delivery, so they use estimates for the two (or more) most likely to be used.

@kevlin *) And even though the window is very wide, it generally isn't fake. In a lot of cases it's based on the actual historic performance of deliveries to your address or neighbourhood. If it's so wide, it usually means the delivery van covers a wide area and the actual route differs too much between days.

For my address, deliveries through PostNL are usually reported with an initial window of one or two hours, and updates (through their app) do get more specific and accurate.

@kevlin The problem with saying between 10 and 15, is that if they then arrive between 09:50 and 10:00, there will be people who'll complain that they arrived "too early", and if you then instead say between 09:00 and 15:00, then people will complain the window is too wide and "imprecise".

The fake(*) precision is part of the message, that it's specific to your delivery and that you shouldn't bother contacting customer service to get a real time window.

*: see next reply...