Sween Myth-tery of Life   ::   Asprin Robert

I was in my room, making another of my feeble attempts to make head or tail of the stack of spreadsheets that Bunny and Grimble kept passing me on an almost daily basis. As those of you who have been following these adventures from the beginning may recall, I can read ... or, at least, I had thought that I could. Since undertaking the task of sorting out the kingdom's finances, however, I had found out that reading text, which is to say, words, is a lot different than being able to read numbers.

I mean, we were all in agreement as to our goal, which was to eliminate or lessen the kingdom's debt load without either placing a staggering tax burden on the populace or cutting so much off the operating budget that the necessary administrative operations became non-functional. As I say, we were all in agreement ... verbally ... with words. Any time there was a disagreement between Grimble and Bunny on particulars, however, and they came to me to cast the deciding vote or make a decision, they would each invariably support their side of the argument by passing me one or more of those cryptic sheets covered with numbers and not much else, then wait expectantly as I scanned it, as if their case had just become self-explanatory.

Now, for those of you who have never been placed in this situation, let me offer a little clarification. When I say I can't read numbers, I don't mean that I can't decipher the symbols. I know what a two is and what it stands for and how it differs from, say, an eight. The problem I was confronted with in these arguments was trying to see them in relation to each other. To do a "word analogy," if the numbers were words, both Bunny and Grimble could look at a page full of numbers and see sentences and paragraphs, complete with subtleties and innuendos, whereas I would look at the same page and see a mass of unrelated, individual words. This was particularly uncomfortable when they would pass me two pages of what to them was a mystery novel, and ask my opinion on who the killer was.

Even though I knew they knew I was a numeric illiterate, I had gotten awfully tired of saying "Duh, I don't know" in varying forms, and, in an effort to salvage a few shreds of my self-respect, had taken to saying instead "Let me look these over and get back to you." Unfortunately, this meant that at any specific point in time, I had a batch of these "mystery sheets" on my desk that I felt obligated to at least try to make sense of.

Anyhoo, that's what I was doing when a knock came at my door. In short, I was feeling inept, frustrated, and desperately in need of diversion.