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Friday, January 31, 2014

216 Reasons Why Numbers Suck

Give me the alphabet and I see beautiful bright colours. Give me a list of numbers and I see chaos and nonsense. I never liked numbers. Never liked maths. Thought time was a bullshit concept put in place to regiment us. Couldn't understand why people liked referring to numbers so much. Why numbers were so important. I had an ex boyfriend who believed he was being haunted by the number 22. I scoffed at the idea.

When I came back from Thailand I worked in an office 'til the boss was too big an asshole for me to put up with. I started a new job in a clothes shop just before Christmas. They had decided to open a smaller shop for ladieswear in the same shopping centre. It survived over Christmas but afterwards they turned it into a bit of an outlet shop. I was the only one that didn't mind working there. So, it was taken for granted that I would always work there. I had help and company the odd time but not very often. The shop survived for months getting rid of all the stock that couldn't be shifted in any of the other stores. The shop's store number was 216. The longer I worked there by myself the more I hated the shop. The number 216 started to pop up, reminding me of my loathing for my job.

Then I remembered that when I was teaching in Thailand my favourite class were 2/16. Unlike the other classes I saw them more than once a week and built up a relationship with them. They were very cute. And sometimes naughty. So the number 216 kept popping up in my life but I had a positive thing to relate it to, as well as a negative thing. I do look atthe clock several times a day but you can be guaranteed that when it's 20:16, 21:06 or 02:16 I will instinctively look up to see the time.

There is a game I play on the computer called Mah Jong. It's like a Chinese tile game where you match pairs. I was playing this for a long time and could never completely clear the board, though often got close, when I realised that if I did clear the board the score would 216. This made me chuckle and not long after I decided that if I cleared the board, scoring 216, I would do something. I don't like to say what but two weeks after I decided this I was lying in bed one night and without any warning I cleared the board on the game. I'd got my 216 score. Though I didn't feel ready to do the thing I said I would do. The next day I didn't need to do anything. The thing I told myself I would do just happened.

Needless to say this made me very intrigued about the number 216. It's strange how this number figured in my life for almost 5 years before I thought to see if it had any meaning. Wikipedia helped me out on this one. A quick search shows that the number 216 has associations with the Devil. And to think I didn't believe in him!

4 comments:

Rob Z Tobor said...

I was rather intrigued that something you would normally have to do, would just happen. I would be pleased if it was something like cutting the lawn or chopping firewood I do sometimes hope they would just happen but they stubbornly refuse to, and insist I get seriously involved.

How do you feel about 612 it is sort of like 216 but bigger.

hootchinhannah said...

Oh, it wasn't something I would normally have to do. It was something that I wanted to do but had to pluck up the courage to do it. 612 means nothing to me. Most numbers don't.

Optimistic Existentialist said...

I used to notice the number 333 everywhere. It was my cumulative GPA, saw it on clocks all the time, etc. Crazy stuff.

hootchinhannah said...

There seems to be meaning attached to every single number possible. I wonder what 4857988 means?