system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: If five friends are waiting on a sixth for 10 minutes, 50 minutes of collective time has been spent, not 10.

I've a long discussion with a friend over this. My arguments have been:

* If you have five workers charging $10 per hour that collectively worked an hour, you charge $50, not $10. My friend agrees with this idea, but says when money isn't involved it's different and time is no longer collective. 
* If Tom Sawyer and four friends paint a fence in 10 minutes, it collectively takes 50. Otherwise it would take Tom alone 50 minutes. He agrees that it would take Tom 50 minutes, but says it's only using 10 minutes worth of time, not 50. 

This whole thing started when my four friends and I were heading to the beach and one of us gets a phone call and says 'hey I got locked out of my house will you give me a ride'. We \(all\) then proceed to pick her up, take her to get an extra key, and back to her house.' This took a half hour and I said "We collectively wasted 2.5hrs of our time running around town before our beach trip." 

From there we've discussed this for hours and we both refuse to change positions, obviously because we each think we're correct. 

Change my view.
gpt
The way you are phrasing it is extremely pedantic and not how people would typically use language. You are *technically* correct as you've defined it, but the way you've defined it comes across as extremely impersonal, as if you're billing for your time like a contractor, and most people wouldn't readily use that kind of language to talk about friendships.

Unless you want to give the impression you think of friendship as similar to billing-for-hours, and are willing to deal with the fact such a thing will come across very unclearly and poorly, your friend is right. You should not use that kind of language in casual conversation.