Bob's Corner
From our weekly issue dated April 22, 2009
Numbers always have bothered me. Especially in high school and college during courses involving algebra, geometry, trigonometry and other inhumane situations.
Now numerals are running rampant. What is your age; your date of birth? What is your Social Security number; your Medicare number? What is your address, telephone number, ZIP Code, hat size, sleeve length, driver license number, car license plate? Arghh!! Numbers are taking over the world.
What is the GNP? What is the inflation rate? What’s your income? How about the unemployment figures, the number of homeless, the number of people earning less than the designated poverty-level income? How many days until Christmas? How many grandchildren do you have, and what are their ages?
Is the population rising -- give us the figures! How many children are being born? Which reminds me of the story about a meeting of world leaders concerned about the birth rate. Said one man, “Gentlemen, somewhere on this planet a woman gives birth every 45 seconds.” Another delegate answered, “Well, we’ve got to find that woman and stop her.”
And this somehow brings us to the telephone directory used by my late parents. Actually this brings to mind another story; this one about the folks who produce those doggone telephone directories. It’s been announced that to save money, the new listings will not be in alphabetical order.
Now we’re back to my parents. They had a directory (actually they had two of those small booklets available at many stores) of phone numbers for their physicians, drug stores, family members, associates, plumbers, tax consultant, financial adviser, yard-care people, house cleaners and the like. The wonderful aspect of the two booklets was that they literally did not involve alphabetizing.
Numbers were scattered willy-nilly. So it was always a fascinating adventure to seek a number for any of the people they wanted to contact. I tried to help them with it, but quit before my brain exploded.
At this point, what with being inundated with numbers from all sectors of my life, I’m thinking we might forego the alphabet and simply switch entirely to numbers: 9,12,12 12,5,20 25,15,21 11,14,15,23 ...
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