The Things We Could Have Been Doing

Every day I take the train to and from work. In the morning, the door-to-door journey is 1 hour and 15-25 minutes, usually depending on the suburban traffic that the company shuttle bus has to wend its way through. The way home is reliably an hour and a half.
During one trip home, as the group of us sat on the upper level of the train car, a row of laptops open, a friend started to calculate the number of hours he'd spent commuting. He began to quantify this time in the equivalents to 'work years.' So if I commute 3 hours a day, 3 days taking the train = just over one workday. 52 weeks a year, 5 8-hour work days a week...

I think for me the Excel spreadsheet indicated it was maybe 3 months of work days that I'd spent riding the train. The poor soul who'd inspired this discussion was a guy I don't know who's being taking the same train for fifteen years. His name might be Willie Loman, poor workaday fellow.

Today we considered Chapter 2 of this calculation. In the time that we've been sitting on the train, what could we have achieved?

Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Mt. Everest in 3 months.
Abraham Lincoln freed a people from enslavement in about 2 years, added my friend, calculating the time from Lincoln's election to the Emancipation Proclamation. (History scholars will debate the true effectiveness of the Proclamation, but you get my point.)
The Iditarod typically takes 10 days. (One month commuting and I could have run the Iditarod. I have not yet figured out the mileage equivalent.)I wondered, how long did Brown vs. Board of Education take to win? How many Supreme Court cases could I have won?
How long did it take F. Scott Fitzgerald to write The Great Gatsby? (A compliment should go to Uncle Paul here, who did use his train time wisely: to read the plays of Shakespeare.)
How long to win the war in Iraq? (This may well make even my lifelong cumulative commuting time look brief.)

There is a flip side, the hours spent on the Metra are hours not spent waiting in line for the ladies room; on hold with the airline; folding laundry; taking the cat to the vet or the car to the shop.