15 October 2009
The Numbers Game
Numbers and I have had a tumultuous history. Our working relationship is just fine, but I have an almost pathological inability to recollect them.
For example, Pete has had to create special mnemonic devices to help me remember my four-digit ATM PINs, and I have at least one bank account with a forgotten access code. I don’t know my own cell phone number, because the letters can’t be converted into any words or phrases. And, when I was in high school, I forgot my own locker combination.
Let me explain that last one a bit more. My high school was built only a couple of years before I reached 9th grade, and the sherbet-colored lockers contained their own built-in combination locks, no doubt for some blend of security and aesthetic considerations. This meant that we held the same lockers for all four years of high school, to prevent unnecessary terrorization of the innocent freshman now in possession of some malevolent junior’s locker. Which meant that, if I visited my locker a minimum of four times a day, 180 days a year, for four years, I would have twirled those three numbers about 3,000 times.
Which is why I trudged into the main office so dejectedly one afternoon after AP Bio.
“I forgot my locker combination,” I mumbled to the secretary, and gave her my full name.
“Wait, what year are you?” she asked, looking at me with raised eyebrows over the tops of her glasses.
“Uh… a senior?”
“And why do you need to be reminded of your locker combination?”
“Because I, uh, forgot it?” And I gave her my most winning, and sheepish, smile.
She thought about this for a minute, and while she clearly thought there was something sketchy in the whole affair, she also had no reason not to help me out. “Here you go,” she said. “I wrote it down for you. Just don’t lose that paper.”
And numbers and I have been like that ever since.
Fast-forward 11 years or so, and I noticed that somebody at the Y had a kind of combination lock featuring letters, not numbers. It grabbed my eye as I walked past, turned to the benevolent combination of “ZERT.” No numbers, just ZERT. I have got to get me one of those.