The Pile What Grows

The other day I ordered 19.5 tons of crushed granite for the yard. I'm not sure why I insist on adding that probably hypothetical ".5". Whether I got the 0.5 tons or not depended mostly on the loader operator, and who knows what he was thinking as he loaded my gravel. Mostly I think "19 tons" sound arbitrary, like I'm making it up, but "19.5 tons" sounds clinical and precise, spoken the way an Apollo mission controller would say it.

Which would you rather hear?

"Uh, roger, Apollo 11, we'd like you to burn the SPS for about 19 seconds."

"Uh, roger, Apollo 11, burn the SPS for 19.5 seconds."

It's all in what engineers call "significant digits." My point is all but made!

So they deliver my gravel in a dump truck that has more supplemental axles than Carter has pills, and my immediate reaction upon viewing the pile was "Huh. That's a bit of a disappointment." I wasn't expected an Everest-sized heap of gravel, but certainly something a bit more grand that I actually got.

So I fetched hither my square-point shovel and tractor and cart and pitchfork and started shoveling gravel around. I shoveled and shoveled and shoveled. I covered a big chunk of the front yard and realized that the pile hadn't diminished by so much as an iota. It's not a pile of gravel at all - it's a perpetual source of half-minus crushed granite! Dig all you want, the pile will make more!

I guess the moral of the story is don't ask for a big pile of gravel - you might actually get one, and then where will you be?