My counting obsession

Mathematics was never my favorite subject in school and neither did I perform very well in that subject but over the years mental arithmetics, I have discovered, keeps me sharp and in a good frame of mind. In my vocation as a banker numbers shall inevitably come up whether it be cash, interest rates, foreign exchange rates, fixed deposit rates, business targets etc. Because our lives have now become completely automation driven from cash counting, to calculations, to system posting to deposit and loan conversion tables, to foreign exchange monitoring, to shares trading etc fewer and fewer people now calculate their figures manually.In golf also you are always counting something from the number of strokes you have made to tallying up the final score for yourself and the person you are marking and how can I forget the bet money with the various permutations of computing bets!

While admittedly square roots, sine, cosine and tangents are all alien things that are irrelevant to the ordinary mortal I know that these are an important part of someone's day to day job but not for me!! Why someone had to force us to learn these equations is beyond me upto today but I am sure a good living is made by those with the predisposition for these things. I am however now mentally able to calculate the acres in a hectare, the square feet in square metres, the litres in a cubic foot, the yards in a metre, kilometers per hour in miles per hour, the miles per hour in kilometers per hour, the amount of dollars/pounds/euro in Kenya shillings and vice versa etc.

I have counted bumps on the Thika Highway between Nairobi & Nyeri and a bit of useless triva for whatever it is worth is that believe it or not there are over 100 bumps including those annoying rumble strips along that 141 kilometer road from Naivas on Thika Road to Nyeri Town. 24 of these bumps are between Skuta as you approach Nyeri town and my house on Baden Powell Road a distance of probably 6 kilometers. Whether these bumps add any longevity in years to the people of Nyeri or are just an inconvenient drag and fuel expense to motorists may never be know because no one is sure why they had to be so many bumps in the first place.

To keep myself awake as well as to ease off on the gas pedal on some of my journeys usually while alone, I often count the number of Toyota vehicles folowing each other in a single file (excluding trucks,buses and motor cycles) be they Prados, Proboxes, Hiluxes, Hiaces, Mark X's, Corolla's, Allexes, Allion's, Surf's, Caribs, Crowns, Mark II's etc. The most at any one count have been a staggering 35 proving that Kenya is indeed Toyota country followed a distant second by Nissan! In the heavy commercial category, Mercedes Actros seems to be the clear runaway leader based on my experiences along Mombasa Road where these behemoths rule the highways while in the delivery van category Mitsubishi takes the prize!!

So there you have it, a little useless trivia to use as you please for whatever it is worth from the number of bumps along the highway to Nyeri to the dominant numbers of vehicles in different categories on our roads!