Numerical liberation front

I’m glad to have a computer because I was sick of being numerically oppressed and digitally deprived. I had spent my whole life bogged down by numbers from the time I was conceived. A foetus waits 283 days to make its debut. That’s 9 calendar month or 10 lunar months just to confuse the issue. To complicate matters further, doctors record the pregnancy in weeks and the law allows it to be aborted before 3 months and to be a legally viable human being at 28 weeks. But no matter, 46 chromosomes dictate human destiny and heaven help you if you have too many or too few.

Still not convinced I can’t get by with out my number crunching floating point co processor? Let’s start with birthdays. That fateful day creates a whole host of limitations for computerless people. It determines age and what a burden that can become. Age is one of the best forms of numerical oppression we have. With my computer I can turn and tumble my age until it becomes unrecognisable – but not so for the non-binary rest.

You have to start school at 5. You may not go earlier or later. Too bad if your birthday is in the wrong month and you have to wait until the next intake or repeat what you have already done because you didn’t do a full 41 weeks of Reception. You are then compelled to remain at school until you are 16, like it or not. You can start work at 15 but no one wants you – something to do with Lord Shaftesbury and the exploitation of child labour. But we’ve all heard of teenage prodigies putting the wind up nations by gainfully employing their time on computers. Some kids need to work. Left to their own devices they make negative choices for some reason. I bet they won’t be twiddling their toenails when they are 65 and deemed no longer fit for the workforce.

This age thing gets even worse. Prior to 18 you can be forbidden all sorts of fun. Perhaps rightly so, but how that can be used and abused. No wine, women and song for you ,my son, on pain of illegality. So you defy the numerical barrier and create your own age related mayhem. At 18 you can sign your life away and vote but you’ll still be told you are too young because life begins at 40. See how restrictive numbers are?

Then you have star signs and biorhythms wreaking havoc with your daily living. 9 planets(give or take one or two, depending on the boffins) have an awesome power over you which no self respecting astrologer will ever let you forget. Worse still you’re thrown headlong onto the crests and dumped into the troughs of your biorhythms which tie you to a 33 day intellectual cycle, a 28 day physical cycle and a 23 day emotional cycle. Now I can log onto a site or run my software and my computer works it all out in a jiffy. I don’t have to sit there wading through numbers and readings and charts. My computer tells me everything at a stroke of a key.

The birthday stuff is daunting enough but there are so many numbers you have to remember just to exist in our society aka the economy. Economies thrive on numbers - pin numbers, bank account numbers, tax file numbers, ID numbers, phone numbers, mobile numbers, registration numbers, authentication numbers, credit card numbers, enrolment numbers, club membership numbers. Whew! The list goes on and on in our bureaucratic, systematised society. Numbers can swamp your adult life and forgetting them can be very painful. Try forgetting your PIN number for the ATM. There’s no chance of telling the machine you’ve had a rotten day and you are suffering from brain fade. Three tries and –whammo!- your card is gobbled up. So then you have to get a new one from the central card snatching agency- complete with a new Pin for you to forget. Quite apart from the fact my computer has a chance of talking some sense to these sorts of infernal machines, the word processor deals with the deadly dull correspondence relating to these matters. Email is God’s gift to the numerically oppressed. It’s all resolved by the send and receive buttons and a few well chosen words. I even have the option of an encrypted password file. Yes!

Now do you understand? Numbers are to blame for everything. You eat too many kilojoules; your cholesterol is above 5 somethings; you’re over .05; you went over 50km; you’re an only child from a 1 parent family; you pay 43 cents in the dollar; you’re above or below the income threshold. And 10-1 you had a bet on the horses, a twirl of the gaming machines or a flutter on the lotto. You wouldn’t want to try one of those winning systems they keep advertising computers can work out? I am so glad I have my computer. I leave all the number crunching to it, God bless its little keyboard.