It's possible that median is a better measure of central tendency for those things. It also sounds like you're interpreting their use of 'average' as meaning median when you think that would make more sense, rather than asking them (and in fairness, I don't usually grill people on which measure they're thinking of when they say 'average' either). In my experience, people who actually understand the different measures of central tendency usually (on average, heheh) specify one explicitly. The rest of the population is probably only aware of arithmetic mean.
There are three generally used measures of central tendency:
- The mean: the "arithmetic average", sum of observations divided by count.
- The median: the central measure. The single value (or averaged pair) at the center point of an ordered listing.
- The mode: the most frequently occurring measure. Sort a set of values by frequency, and pick the most frequent instance.
Most people intend "mean" as "average", but that's not strictly the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
For our next pedant's corner post, we'll take on the distinction between descriptivist and prescriptivist definitions.