I spent a while trying to explain the purpose behind the numbers when it came up, but no, it really just kept coming back to the variance numbers being big. Not "why is the estimate for this so uncertain?", but more "Why is this number 100000? That's big".
This was actually not a time estimate. We were estimating the footprint for our production deployment for a very complicated distributed system. Most of the pieces were only in early development and the load model itself was uncertain by orders of magnitude.
It's a situation where statistics is easily applied, if you know statistics. If you don't, you'll never even realize it would have helped and keep saying that math is useless outside of school.
