666th Post - Yikes!

Welcome to the 666th post of Bevboy's Blog.

I had nothing special planned for this post until I realized that, a) it's the 666th post; and b) it's a Sunday. At the risk or upsetting the minister who reads this blog, and my old friend Reg who also reads this blog every day, I will state that I feel compelled to update this blog every single day of the year, at least once. I didn't plan for this post to appear on a Sunday. It just turned out that way.

I do have a little 666 anecdote to share with you, that shows the level to which people will go to avoid upsetting people. One provincial government department I have had dealings with over the years deliberately skipped over the "666" suffix on their computer user id's for fear of offending the person who would have ended up with it.

(Never mind which department.)

Let's suppose that the prefix were, say, "AB". The people who create the user id's would likely start the sequence with "AB001", and then go to "AB002" for the next person who required a user id, and so on. By the time they got to "AB665", they skipped over the next logical entry in that sequence and went right to "AB667".

I understand that "666" is a pretty provocative number for Christians. I get that. But to label the 666th entry in a sequence as "667" doesn't change the fact that there were, if just for a short time, 666 user id's starting with "AB". It's kinda like calling peanut butter "apple sauce". You're avoiding offense, I suppose, but looking silly in the process.

Perhaps I should have called this post something else.

Bev