Thursday, June 22, 2006

5:55:55

On my way to the post office just a while ago, I glanced at the MTR clock. In that precise moment that I was looking at it, what I saw was:

2:22:22

Twenty-two minutes and twenty-two seconds past two. While the time was inconsequential, it was the fact that there are 5 2s in that split second that amazed me.

This reminded me of my earlier years at Adformatix. Every afternoon, we'd all gather around the MAC classic a few minutes before 6pm. You'd see me, Kuya Ers, Shash, Xtine, Minnie, Jojo, and whoever else is in the room standing there just looking at the screen. We're actually waiting for the digital screensaver clock to say:

5:55:55

Mundane as it may seem, we did that because 5 was the last digit that can appear on screen 5 times. (I haven't been to a country that had sixty-six minutes and sixty-six seconds past 6 or 6:66:66)

Once the clock showed those 5 digits, we'd all clap and howl and cheer. Then, after that split second, we'd all go back to our cubicles to do our own business.

I'm sure the Futura team though we were weird for doing that, and I can't blame them. What we did was totally meaningless and pointless. But like many things in this life, the totally meaningless and pointless things are the exact same things that put smiles on our faces and make life more fun and memorable.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, I didn't realize that 5:55:55 thingie until now.
Not exactly a recurrence of numbers, but of occurence... I always get the chills when on my way up to my room, I always see 3:00 (yes, AM, the deepest darkest hour of the night, when ghouls come out and stuff like that) on the wallclock. Happened on my cellphone, once too, when we were talking about ghost stories in some hotel, right at the exact moment we were talking about the 3:00 phenomenon. Yikes!

Dazed and Confused said...

Oh yes. I believe they call 3:00am the "Witching Hour" when all the bad spirits come out. I've had a couple of run-ins with that phenomenon, too.