What's the significance of THAT number?
I haven't seen the Number 13 movie, or whatever it's called, Thirteen or something (with Jim Carrey) but I hear it's because he's got some obsession over the number 13. I've got a similar, shall we say preoccupation instead of obsession per se, of the number 238. A high school friend was visiting Wichita Falls again after having moved out, and I remembered looking at his hotel room's door number thinking, "Hmm, 238, I need to remember that," and that was my introduction to the chain of events. Since then, I have seen the number 238 in loads of locations, most of them totally at random. I think the first place I noticed it after that was a shelf price for something at Wal-Mart shortly thereafter, listed as $2.38, and it was more or less just a, "Hmm! That was Brian's room number. Weird," and it just stuck out to me as really significant in that single moment. Later I would glance at my watch and it would be 2:38 am or pm (as I'm up at both times frequently), just looking at the clock completely by accident. I was working at the Times Record News at the time, and the newspapers coming off the press line and into these large rotating devices that put the advertising inserts inside, and the rotating machines have a counter that ticks off a digital number as each paper passes through. I would *completely randomly* glance at the ticker to see how many papers we'd been through (ticking up to around 45,000) and would catch combinations of xx,238 in the split second that it went by.
After several dozen total coincidences, I wondered if it were like something from this episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (On YouTube, Parts one, two, three, four, five)where the crew is stuck in a time loop and Data sends a message to their repeating selves, in time to avoid a collision that causes the loop in the first place. The message was the number "3" that would bizarrely appear in computational results improperly and in peculiar coincidences throughout the ship.
I've randomly tried to "notice" other strings of numbers, such as 914, which a Japanese girl-pop star says is her favorite number, among other strings, but haven't noticed any of them even close to as frequently as 238. One of the absolutely FLOORING coincidences was so amazing that I audibly spoke out in the middle of work, kinda loud, "What.. In... The... WORLD?" but no one was around to hear me, I guess. I was so taken back by how absurdly unlikely that I could have encountered such a bizarre error, and on THAT number of all numbers to error on, that I sat there for maybe five minutes or more just staring at it in utter disbelief --
I was scanning through items in the regular ladies clothes going through them to see which needed to be clearanced. Generally when you come across one, the PDA will ask you how many clearance tickets you need to print because you may have more than one present. There's a limitation, though, if you key in too many by accident, the screen will prompt you that a strangely high number has been entered and to correct the entry. However, I had never even touched the keypad, which is required before that error even comes up. The PDA glitched for a second, and then came up saying "238 is too many for this item" and I was like WTF. First of all, that it glitched saying I entered too many when I'd never even entered a single thing, and secondly, for glitching up on THAT specific number. For an instant I wondered if someone could have been messing with me, tricking me somehow, so I looked around and no one was even close by. I sat there for a good five minutes of doing nothing, trying to think of ways that number could have possibly been entered, much less for that error to have even appeared with that number or otherwise. I was pretty weirded out that day because of it.
This is my 238th LJ entry, by the way. I tried to write the entry several other times earlier but just wasn't ready. When looking through my old entries in the dashboard, there was a line of stats that said, "237 entries," etc, so I knew what I needed to write about =P
After several dozen total coincidences, I wondered if it were like something from this episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (On YouTube, Parts one, two, three, four, five)where the crew is stuck in a time loop and Data sends a message to their repeating selves, in time to avoid a collision that causes the loop in the first place. The message was the number "3" that would bizarrely appear in computational results improperly and in peculiar coincidences throughout the ship.
I've randomly tried to "notice" other strings of numbers, such as 914, which a Japanese girl-pop star says is her favorite number, among other strings, but haven't noticed any of them even close to as frequently as 238. One of the absolutely FLOORING coincidences was so amazing that I audibly spoke out in the middle of work, kinda loud, "What.. In... The... WORLD?" but no one was around to hear me, I guess. I was so taken back by how absurdly unlikely that I could have encountered such a bizarre error, and on THAT number of all numbers to error on, that I sat there for maybe five minutes or more just staring at it in utter disbelief --
I was scanning through items in the regular ladies clothes going through them to see which needed to be clearanced. Generally when you come across one, the PDA will ask you how many clearance tickets you need to print because you may have more than one present. There's a limitation, though, if you key in too many by accident, the screen will prompt you that a strangely high number has been entered and to correct the entry. However, I had never even touched the keypad, which is required before that error even comes up. The PDA glitched for a second, and then came up saying "238 is too many for this item" and I was like WTF. First of all, that it glitched saying I entered too many when I'd never even entered a single thing, and secondly, for glitching up on THAT specific number. For an instant I wondered if someone could have been messing with me, tricking me somehow, so I looked around and no one was even close by. I sat there for a good five minutes of doing nothing, trying to think of ways that number could have possibly been entered, much less for that error to have even appeared with that number or otherwise. I was pretty weirded out that day because of it.
This is my 238th LJ entry, by the way. I tried to write the entry several other times earlier but just wasn't ready. When looking through my old entries in the dashboard, there was a line of stats that said, "237 entries," etc, so I knew what I needed to write about =P