I guess my childhood had the same share of disappointment as anyone else's. When I was sixteen, my girlfriend left me for a guy who was an eight where it counted, and I was only a six.

I didn't take it too personally though, because in the other number? He was only a thousand and dropping rapidly. When he died a few weeks later, she wanted me back, but I'd moved on.

I dated a thirty-nine for a while. She was crazy. Classic thirty-nines, I guess.

One summer's day my other other number jumped from zero to seventeen overnight, and I was terrified. Turned out that one was just measuring how many pieces of watermelon you'd eaten in the last week. Numbers, right?

Today it got weird, though. I didn't bother to check the mirror before I went out but everywhere I went people were staring at the space just above each other's heads or cursing the sky. I saw a man in a suit shambling around, his latest bank statement clutched in one fist. "I'm telling you," he said, to anyone who would listen, "this is my net worth! It should be over my head in great big red letters! Something's gone wrong!"

Well, that much was obvious, strange suit man. I wandered further into town. As a completely average guy (I mean, 31/225/54/69/192/580/010/293/12/1/1/23/5/6/9? What the hell, could I be more boring?) I wasn't too fussed about the sudden disappearance of the numbers. It's not like I was missing out on much.

There was a raving preacher in sackcloth at the corner of my local coffeeshop, raving about the end times. A crowd were milling nearby uncertainly. Without the numbers, we couldn't tell if he was a fifteen or a thirty-two, and that made it hard to know whether to take him seriously.