What is the perfect time to run and pee during a movie?

Your bladders have spoken, and we were listening. Infinity Peecoin owners, who were using the RunPee Timer, were given the option record when they finished using a Peetime. Basically, there was a button on the Synopsis Screen that said, “When you’re back in your seat please press to record how long it took you to run and pee.”

Here are the Results

• The average time a person spent running to pee was 168.1 seconds ( 2min 48sec).
• On average that person used a Peetime that begin 62.2 minutes (1hour, 2min) into the movie.
• The average length of the Peetime was 239.1 seconds (3min, 59sec). Therefore they got back, on average, about one minute before the Peetime ended.

Deceiving Averages

Averages oftentimes don’t tell the whole story. The average of 4 and 6 is 5, but so is the average of 1 and 9. Therefore, I wrote a long MySQL case statement to chunk the numbers into groups that I could chart. This is what it looks like:

Two-thirds of the users were able to complete their business and return to their seats in about three minutes. A Peetime that is three and one-half minutes long will be suitable in 78% of cases.

Recommended vs Emergency

I also recorded if the Peetime used was a Recommended or Emergency Peetime.

• Emergency = 20
• Recommended = 266
• Neutral = 183

Even though not all movies have a Recommended Peetime their popularity stands out. Likewise for the Emergency Peetimes, which were rarely used. It could be argued that we shouldn’t even bother with a Peetime if it’s an emergency, but if there’s one thing we should have all learned over the past two years, it’s to plan for emergencies.

The Perfect Peetime

Based on the data the perfect Peetime would start about one hour into the movie, last just over three minutes, and be recommended. Unfortunately, Peetimes aren’t created; they’re discovered. We really have to work with what each movie gives us. Our goal is to try and find one Peetime in each 30-minute span of a movie. Sometimes that works out to be easy to do and sometimes it’s impossible.

It’s also good to know that Peetimes really aren’t just the boring parts of a movie. To be more accurate: they are the parts of a movie that can be concisely summarized and don’t involve any of the crucial parts of a movie that no one should miss.

The RunPee Guidelines Come From Our Fans

Like I mentioned before, we can’t make a Peetime anytime we want. It’s up to the movie. But recently we have changed some of our guidelines based on user feedback. In the past, we really started looking for Peetime about 30 minutes into a movie. Our thinking is that most users should be able to hold it until the first Peetime about 30-45 minutes in.

However, many users pointed out the previews before a movie can run 20-25 minutes these days. When you include that time it means users have to wait 50-110 minutes before a Peetime, and this is also prime soda drinking time. Therefore, we now start looking for Peetimes about 15-20 minutes into a movie, with the hope of finding one before the 30-minute mark.

Again, not all movies cooperate, but that’s the goal. 🙂

We’ve also begun trying to make shorter Peetimes. In the past we considered a 4-minute Peetime to be the goal, but we’ve shortened that to just over 3-minutes. That means we might find more Peetimes with shorter synopsis.

Feedback is Crucial, and We Listen

Please let us know if you have any thoughts on how we can further improve our Peetime finding process.