Choose a Number
Numbers. How many numbers can there be on a hospital floor? Numbers for blood pressure, glucose level, heart rate, body temperature, dosages, analyses results, rooms, beds. Even for urinals and bed pans. Everything has a number stamped on it. Most of the documents are made up of numbers, with a few interspersed letters, generally acronyms. How many numbers do we handle in our daily lives? How many phone numbers and license numbers? How many zip codes? How many passwords made up mostly of numbers? How many PIN numbers? How many document numbers, such as Social Security or National Identity Document (DNI) do we have to remember? How many of them have become useless in our daily lives, yet we still have them up there, among all the necessary ones we can't remember well? I still remember my telephone number from when I lived in Boston - twenty-five years ago. Yet I have trouble remembering my husband's present phone number. What would we have done if the Arabs hadn't intro...