19,999,800

A brief web-search for my calculator's latest dream, along with the usual cascade of gibberish numbers that populate cyberspace, brought me this quote from some Independent article in relation to British Telecom's answering service:
"Along with 19,999,800 other disappointed people, I soon tasted the bitterness of failure and frustration..."
I can sympathise.

My search also threw up an interesting coincidence: 19999800 happens to be the OCLC (online computer library center) number for a book called "Dream Chasers". No idea what its about, but the title is strangely apt, given the subject of this blog.

I suspect a lot of this blog will be built upon coincidence, mainly because the numbers themselves tend to hold very little meaning on their own. The internet serves as a primordial soup of information from which connections may readily form.

My calculator, on the other hand, is connected to nothing in this world, apart from my own fingers - and even those it declines the use of for its nightly adventures. I can't even imagine a scenario where I would require all eight digits of its display for any of my calculations. The world I deal with rarely travels further than a few figures either side of the decimal point.

Nineteen million nine-hundred and ninety-nine thousand eight hundred? The stuff of dreams...