Silly thing happened at work today.
The VPN went down in the afternoon.
Ben, who was in the Sydney offices, was waiting on us to restore the connection.
He asked, "How long?" (referring to restarting the router)
Nathan happily supplied the answer, "A piece of string I'm afraid."
Greg then offered, "That is twice the length from the middle to either end."
Smart.
How long is a piece of string?
For those who are interested, intrinsic to a piece of string, it has length.
But, that length is unknown because it is never specified.
Hence the phrase "How long is a piece of string?" has come to mean that a quantitative answer is not known.
And, there is an implicate understanding that the answer will be difficult to find given the information currently available at hand.
When asked by a client to estimate the costs of a project still in the earliest stages, it is better to reply with a, "I'll need to get back to you with some hard numbers."
An alternate to this phrase is "How much does a vacation cost?" It embodies the same sense of an indeterminate quantity.
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