Getting to the Root of Being Square

2,300 hours.

That's how long I spent riding school busses during my less-than-illustrious K-12 career. If a person were to work a 40-hour week beginning on January 1, 2006, he or she would need to keep working until February 18, 2007, just to log in the same amount of time I spent riding a bus. This is the kind of self-directed learning takes place when one has 2,300 hours to kill.

My 14 months on the bus also allowed me to ponder some of the more overlooked questions of the human experience. For example, "I wonder if my home phone number is the only one in Bartow, Florida that ends in a whole square root?" As it turns out, it was. What are the chances? There were, after all, 12,000 other people living there at the time.

Ironically, the square root was 2,309, which is almost exactly the number of hours I had spent on the school bus. Go figure. (Never mind, I guess I just did that.) The only other phone numbers that could have joined this elite class would have been the squares of 2,308 and 2,310. After a check with the city's authoritative phone guide in the public library, I learned that these two numbers did not exist. Further, the phone numbers for both 2,307 and 2,311 were beyond the range of the city's directory at the time. Bottom line: I could rest assured that my home number was unique. Now, what to do with such utterly useless knowledge? Write a blog entry, I guess.

One might think, based on my early preoccupation with numbers, that I'm good at math. I'm not. So, it's a bit odd that I discovered this odd fact about my phone number. Mysteries like this, though, are waiting to whisper themselves to those people with 2,300 hours to spare. I guess that means I had less excuse in college when I told people they could dial 726-JERK to reach me at my dorm. Anyway, math has never been my best subject, but perhaps it's being rough around the mathematical edges that keeps me from being a total square.