Somewhere along my commute home tonight, my odometer will read 8’s all the way across. As long as I can remember, I’ve paid fairly close attention to the changing numbers - looking for patterns, feeling oddly triumphant when I notice they’re in descending order or paired uniquely or otherwise noteworthy.
Tell me honestly - I can take it - am I alone in this? Is there something wrong with me? I’ve always been mathematically inclined - I can almost always figure out the patterns in various and sundry aptitude tests… but that’s beside the point.
Do you know what your odometer reads and do you care?
We had a major party… (Bar-B-Que and lots of alcohol)… when my dad put 500,000 miles on his pick-up. We officially retired the poor thing shortly after that. There was not enough metal left on it to make a decent toaster, let alone a truck.
I thought I was the only one that did that ChatMom. Tell me, do you look at clocks to see them say 2:34, 11:11 etc…?
My fav is my watch when it hits 2323. I go by military time.
Well, you oughta be a rocket scientist then.:rolleyes:
Watching numbers match up, or seeing patterns (like 96369) is one of the few things that make driving interesting. What I do is look for patterns in numbers and letters on the license plates of cars I pass.
This reminded me of a friend who used to call his wife at, say, 11:11 on Nov 11 and ask her the date - she’d keep pushing the button on her digital watch but the numbers wouldn’t change… she wasn’t one of the brighter ornaments on the tree…
I too love watching the odometer. I discovered it when I was about 7 and was bored sitting in the back seat on family vacation. I sat up to look at my dad driving, when I noticed the little white number moved at about 1 digit every 6 seconds (60 mph [100 kg/m[sup]2[/sup]]).
It’s a little difficult now that I drive, but I remember things like: the first car my wife and I owned, a '95 Ford Escort, turned 10000 miles on our honeymoon, driving between Montreal and Niagara Falls along the Canadian highway that parallels the northern shore of Lake Ontario.
Should that be brightest? (unless there are only two ornaments) anyway…
I can relate to the above story. I’m the idiot who was trying to find out what station his radio is tuned to by pushing the button and wondering why it won’t change from the time display. Well, it happened to be 9:29AM and I was listening to 92.9FM radio.
I sometimes watch my odometer, but I also reset me trip odometer every time I go to the gas station. Then as I am pulling away, I figure out my fuel mileage. Let’s see, I drove 272 miles on 10 gallons of gas… Wow, I got 27.2 MPG. Math is a great boredom killer.
I got a new car a few months ago. I thought it was cool that the odometer and the individual trip odometer were exactly the same for the first 1000 miles.
Out of pure nerdliness, I wanted to bring it in for its first oil change exactly at 3000 miles. Didn’t quite make it for that one. But there’s always 6000…
I’m glad I’m not the only one. I think it’s neat to be able to catch 11111, or 23456, etc. It seems that on our truck, Mrs Wolf is always driving it alone when it hits a nice even milestone like 20000, or 30000.
My Honda hit 99998 after coming home from work one Friday. Knowing I wouldn’t drive it again until Monday morning, we both got in the car Sunday and drove around the neighborhood real slow, and just savored the moment as it rolled to 100000.
I’ll also notice things like the little clock window on my monitor at work, when it’s 1:23 and 45 seconds.
Since this seems to be more common that I thought, does anyone do similar things with words? With a lot of words, I’ll look at them and break them into even groups of letters, or look at them backwards, or re-arrange the letters into new words. I’m probably just a border-line mental patient, though I can finish a Jumble puzzle in about 2 minutes because of it.
I haven’t been out to the car yet but the odometer is sitting at 144,130 km. I know this because I have to record mileage for my job.
And when you aren’t satisfied by having jusy an odometer…
Our van is cool with it’s trip computer that calculates average speed, mileage, distance, etc. Most important to the wife is that it also tells you how much farther you can go before you’re out of gas. With it getting 17.9 mpg in the city it sees the gas station a couple of times a week. The van is bilingual, Lola likes metric while I still prefer Imperial when it comes to calculated things like mileage.
I’m not alone! I’m not alone! I can’t tell you how much this means to me. Before this, my wife just thought I was obsessive compulsive with numbers. Well, I guess I still am but I’m not the only one.
I do the trip computer / gas fill-up thing. I do the number patterns on the odometer and license plates. The fuel consumption averages at different speeds. I do the ETA at various highway speeds. I check if the next rest stop is actully 32 miles away like the sign says.
What’s great is that my car is callibrated in KMs so when I travel in the US I get to do all those great KM to Miles conversions in my head as well.
I’ve used the trip odometer/fuel consumption calculations since I first got my van as a means to gauge the health of my engine. Alas, I’ve lost about 12-15% of my fuel economy, so I need to get it looked over. I hate having to have it worked on, but I hate doing it myself more…
I don’t look for patterns in license tags - it never occurred to me before it was posted here. dang…
…and I’m not exactly a rocket scientist - I work on Navy aircraft - P-3 and F/A-18 at the moment.
I do the odometer thing, usually all the zeros or patterns, althouhg I usually find that I notice I am 1 or 2 miles away from the number pattern and I’m looking forward to it & then I run into a patch of bad traffic or bad weather & have to pay more attention & miss it! I also like dates, that was the worst thing with the year '00 - no date pattern! Not like 9/9/99 etc - although being in the UK, I probably get my pattern dates (except that one) on different dates to you! I like the 11/11 11:11 one that’s fun (mean, but fun!)
Simetra- I had noticed that before, but you said elsewhere that you are a guy. Why would a guy want to be a backwards Artemis? Not picking on you, just being nosey, erm, curious…yeah, I meant curious.
Things I do while driving long distances:
[ul]
[li]Always gas up at the start of the trip, even if that means putting $2.00 in the tank.[/li][li]Reset trip odomoter to 0.[/li][li]Wait until the second the time changes to the exact minute before driving away from the gas station.[/li][li]Every half hour and hour from that exact minute I left, look at the trip odometer and figure out my average MPH thus far.[/li][li]Every time I do that, I mentally calculate how long it will take for the remainder of the trip at both my current average and at 70 MPH (which is what I want to average on my long trips).[/li][li]Mentally note when I reach the following points in my drive: 1/10th of the way, 1/4 of the way and 1/2 way.[/li][li]Figure out time left based upon those times to the minute.[/li][li]Figure out my MPG at every stop for gas and time my pit stops; remembering the time not driving to subtract from the whole time spent in car for actual driving time to cover the distance.[/ul][/li]I have to win some kind of prize for this obsessive compulsive behavior, don’t you think?
If I do, I will clean my trophy seven times per evening in the exact same direction, using the same amount of cleaner on the different sections of the same cloth each time…
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