Really, really long numbers

You know what I liked about the woods? There were no long and pointless numbers. The only numbers we had to deal with meant something real and concrete. Nineteen point seven miles to the next shelter. Two hundred calories in a bagel. Four days since my last shower. Six seconds between lightening and thunder. Two thousand one hundred and seventy-four miles between Springer Mountain and Katahdin.

I spent all day looking up numbers, searching through files for numbers, calling people to obtain new numbers, and typing numbers into an online database. Every file has at least twenty-seven numbers attached to it. They all mean something different, and everybody refers to them by an acronym, so that I, being new, have no idea what they're talking about. The number I need is called a Prime Contract Number by the reporting system, although it is not the same number as the number we call Prime Contract Number internally. When I called the agency that assigned the number, I learned that it might actually be called a PIID number. It might be a VIN number. They don't really know, even though they are the ones that invented it and assigned it. Also, they don't seem to write it on any of the forms they send to us, so that I spent all day getting paper cuts, while looking for elusive 20 (or possibly 21) digit numbers in fat, colored-coded files. Rather Orwellian, isn't it?

In happier number news, I paid off one of my student loans today. They had some issues with numbers that I was sick of dealing with. I feel slightly liberated.