One Million

One million. It’s a number we hear all the time. Casually inserted whenever or wherever we need it to make a point. I started thinking about it the other day and ended up with all kinds of useless yet interesting things. Well, at least useless and interesting to me.

"If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times." Or the variant "If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times." I think children hear this the most. Often coming from an exasperated parent or other adult authority figure at or near wits end. But I started thinking... If you just said "it" once every second how long would it take you to say it a million times? How about 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds. If you never stopped. Went all day and all night without interruption. What about food? Maybe an IV?

Or another kid favorite "But I’ve already had to do that a million times." Usually said regarding some oppressive chore like taking out the trash, watching a baby sibling or cleaning their room. At the rate of once a day it would take 2,739 years and 265 days to actually have done it a million times.

Apply the same time to brushing your teeth. Only do it twice a day from the day you were born. Making dentists everywhere ecstatic. You would be 1,369 years and 315 days old. Should you live so long.

Did you have "a million" of something when you were a kid? Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars? Green army men? Marbles? Jacks? Legos? Whatever little toys you preferred. The ones that only Mom, or especially Dad could step on in the middle of the night and do great damage to themselves with. Depending on the size, if you could get say, 100 into a cubic foot of space it would only take a room 10 feet tall by 10 feet wide by 100 feet long to hold all of them. I don’t know about you, but my bedroom wasn’t that big.

"There must be a million mosquitoes out tonight." I don’t know how many of the little beasties will fit in a cubic foot, but I suspect that a million of them would still pack a 10x10x10 room to the point that a person wouldn’t fit. Or if they could they certainly wouldn’t want to. Just stay out and let them starve.

How about driving? Occasionally I will see a big rig with a million mile plaque on it. If you drove 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year it would only take you 10 years to do it. If you averaged 50 miles per hour whenever you were behind the wheel. You have to respect those guys.

What about money? We would all like to be millionaires. Or at least everyone I know does. Let’s start simple. If you make $100,000.00 dollars a year it obviously will take you 10 years to make a million. Of course you have to live and pay taxes so you can’t keep it all. If you saved $100.00 a week, without interest it would take you 192 years and 16 weeks to do it. Again, should you live so long.

A dollar bill measures 2.5 inches by six and .005 thick. So a stack of one hundred would be one half inch tall. 200 dollars per inch. 2,400 dollars per foot. So, a million dollars would make a stack roughly 3 feet by 4 feet wide and 4 feet tall. And if you go back a few paragraphs you will see that it would take you just over 11 and a half days to count it. I guess that’s why all the bad guys use hundreds. Still takes up a lot of space though. A single stack a little over 4 foot high. Which would be hard to fit in a briefcase. Like they always manage to do in the movies. And still take a long time to count.

If you wanted to spend a million dollars in a year, you would have to spend $2,739 dollars and about 73 cents a day. All day, every day. $114.16 an hour. $1.90 a minute. 24/7. I’d like to try.

But that is a pittance compared with governments. Our national budget is in the trillions these days. That’s a thousand billion. Or a million million. $1,000,000,000,000.00. Just add 6 zeros to the numbers above to get a rough idea of about a third of what our government spends per year. Over $5,000,000.00 a minute. 5 million dollars. A minute. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. At a budget of $2,800,000,000,000.00 (2.8 trillion) for fiscal year 2007.

That math makes my head hurt.