Numbs, Numbers, Numbests

Which of these two statements makes you feel like you are throwing money away:

1. Hey, buddy, can you spare a dime?
2. Your airline miles are about to expire.

Follow-up question: when did airline miles become currency?!? And there's more! How do you react to this statement: Expiring Airline Miles Could Cost Consumers $28 Billion. What does that mean? Is this a figure akin to the national debt? Do we all share a portion of this amount? How exactly will future generations feel the impact of a lost $28 billion airline miles?

I thought I was pretty good at kicking around in a virtual landscape, but this has me perplexed. If my mother had misplaced her stack of S&H Green Stamps rather than spend an evening licking and sticking them into little books, would she have felt a loss over their value in merchandise or just regret at missing out on the experience of having the glue pumped from her stomach? (true story; it was quite a stack of stickers) I can function with the S&H function: you earn stickers by buying items A, B, and maybe C and when enough stickers accumulate, they can be redeemed for item D. If you lose the stickers, you can still buy item D and forever wonder if you would appreciate it more if it had cost you only postage and a little indigestion.

I cannot wrap my mind around losing airline miles, let alone get worked up about it. What frosts my chickens, however, is the fact that this virtual currency is taxed! Wow. That is quite a feat. There is nothing we can point to and say, "here is a pile of miles" yet somehow value is attached, calculated, and taxed. I am going to stop rating my dreams on a scale from 1 to 10 lest they be taxed.

Enough of that. I have another virtual number to share. How old are you? No, really. Well, there is more than one answer to that question—and I don't mean your actual age and what anniversary of your 29th birthday you happen to be celebrating. I happen to be 39 if you count only years. If you count other variables like smoking, drinking, stressing, commuting, and laughing, I am only 19 and can look forward to giggling for another 75 trips around the sun. I don't know the formula but I can point you to the Real Age calculator. Have fun and report back, kiddies.

And then they were billed. Last but not least for today, I would like to share with you a blurb regarding the presentation of numbers as brought to you by that bastion of incomprehensibility, the wireless phone industry. Also, mentioning this allows me to bring the iPhone into today's post and isn't that what it's all about anyway? I still do not have my very own but I have been getting enough pleasure vicariously through the stories of those who stood in line. David Pogue (should that be iPogue?) received his first bill and summed it up thusly:

This development illustrates yet another clash between Apple’s typical philosophy of elegance and simplicity—and the unprepared, cluelessness of its cellular partner.