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STILL LIFE

Counting Trouble

Numbers can be fun. They can be mind-boggling as well. Boggling – if you have a mind that is!

counting

I’ve been trying to cultivate some gray cells since my early school days but all I notice as I reminisce now, is gray hair. I’ve been through elementary with additions, subtractions, divisions and some mathematical quizzes with a lot of ear twisting. Funny thing – I still prefer counting my fingers to a calculator when making a sum total. It’s also probably the reason, of why I end up getting stuck with anything above ten. I can recite numbers 1 to 10 at the speed-of-light but I fumble if I have to repeat them backwards.

At junior-school, one of the most challenging of tables was the multiplication. Anything with an ‘x’ between numbers, almost always spelt doom. It was only as you graduated to Pythagoras and trigonometry that you realized this ‘x’ was just the tip of an iceberg. The ‘x’ factor has been a good part of my life since then, but there’s a certain chill that runs through my veins at the very mention of it.

The most simplest of them all, is off course the humble ‘addition’ that deserves a ‘+’. But even that doesn’t seem to add-up for me. Take my bank balance for instance. It has more subtractions than all the dough I ought to have added up as interest. I don’t understand it. Do you suppose that people who work in banks – flunked kindergarten?

You will appreciate that all said and done – numbers do carry weight. Tilt the scales if you need to figure it out. You will be amazed that the less you eat, the more you weigh but not vice-versa. One more reason to make you hate numbers or you are all your weight in gold.

As you read this, I am waiting to catch the 08.23 up-train to my workplace. According to my calculation, it should have been here, a good 42 minutes ago. Now, unless I have made an enormous error in my counting, I suspect that people who run the trains were never too bright in Mathematics.

Correct me if I’m wrong!

By Felixfoo


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