Your Stories of Striving for Precision
Inconspicuous Consumption readers have some interesting rituals about trying to get things Just Right. Plus more stick figures in peril!
Note: This post is not paywalled and is thus available to all. Enjoy! — Paul
Two weeks ago, inspired by a friend’s story about how he tries to gauge exactly how much gas is going into his car without looking at the pump, I asked Inconspicuous Consumption readers to submit their stories of aiming for precision, whether it’s guessing the elapsed time of something, or gauging the exact amount of something that’s needed for a particular task, or whatever.
You folks did not disappoint. So many good stories! I’ll get to them in a minute, but first I want to revisit a passage that I wrote when requesting these story submissions:
Why am I asking for these stories? In large part because I think this is the type of private behavior that many of us don’t talk about, so we may think that nobody else engages in it. But [I think] these types of things are often more common than we realize. So the idea here, as with so many things regarding the inconspicu-verse, is that I think people may take some comfort in learning that they’re not alone.
I’m fairly certain that the stories I’m about to share with you will achieve that goal. In fact, as you’ll see, there were a few different instances of multiple readers having the same precision ritual! We’re more alike than we may realize, even when we’re being weirdos.
Okay, enough preliminaries — here we go:
Using the Right Amount of Water for Cooking Rice
By Lloyd Alaban
My wife, mother-in-law, and I eat rice every day. Rice is an integral part of our cultures on both sides of our family, and my wife even has a tattoo of a rice cooker because she loves eating rice so much. But I’m the one who cooks the rice each day, and I have a very specific way of doing it.
After measuring out and rinsing the rice, the key is adding the right amount of water for cooking. Too much water and the rice turns out mushy; too little and it turns out too dry. It’s essential that everything is level inside the rice cooker, so I gently push the rice down from the sides of the cooker. I start clockwise, using my index and middle fingers together to force the stray grains to lay flat with the rest of the rice. Then I shake the cooker and tap it to really make sure it’s level.
After flattening the grains, I turn on the sink to cover the rice in water. I use the finger trick to make sure the water line is where it should be. Sometimes I have to slow the water down to a trickle so that the water line stops at the first knuckle of my middle finger. Other times there’s too much and I scoop out the excess water with a mug. The precision pays off — the rice always turns out perfect.
Knowing the Route to My Grandparents’ House
By Elise Bauer
When I was growing up, we drove the five miles to my grandparents’ house so many times that I learned the route by heart. The two stop signs, four red lights, and lone traffic circle are still as vivid in my mind’s eye as they were in 1974, when I was eight. That was the year I perfected a game I secretly played in our car’s back seat: I’d sink down to the carpeted floor and try to track the car’s path without looking out the windows.
As we passed my elementary school, Nick’s Bar-B-Cue, and other local landmarks, I’d gauge our speed and movements, as well as the sounds of the car’s turn signal and my mother’s wedding band clinking against the steering wheel, and try to guess where we were. I’d think, “We must be at the corner by Dr. Foote’s house,” then test myself by suddenly popping up to see if I was right. Most of the time, I was.
I recently shared this story with a work colleague, who said it reminded him of the subway map redesign in the ’70s, where one of the designers rode the subways blindfolded so he could feel twists and turns to better depict them on the map. Here’s an article that references it.
Coordinating a Weekly Chore with a TV Theme Song
By Kevin Belt
When I was a kid, we took the trash out on Monday nights. Monday night was also when The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was on TV. I got in the habit of taking out the trash during the show’s theme song. I would wait for the song to start (“Now this is the story all about how…”), then go outside to take out the trash, all the while singing the song, and then come back in around the “Yo homes, smell ya later” part. After a while, I got really good at sticking to the exact tempo of the song so I was singing in unison with Will Smith.
Mentally Typing
By Kevin Cearfoss
The main reason I took typing in 10th and 11th grades was that I thought Mrs. Ottaviani was good-looking, but it ended up having a big effect on me. Walking home from school, I began to mentally type words I’d see on billboards, signs, license plates, etc., to the point where I got annoyed with my brain because I couldn’t enjoy anything due to of the incessant practicing of the typing strokes in my head.
And buster, when Mrs. O upgraded us from manual to electric typewriters, I couldn’t be stopped. No students could come close to my speed and accuracy. I was so good I began challenging teachers to type-offs!
Timing the Electric Toothbrush
By John Durkos
My wife and I both have an electric toothbrush. Hers is a newer one that gives a pulse every 30 seconds, which prompts you to move the toothbrush to another region of your mouth. My toothbrush, which is older, has no intermediate reminder prompts, so it’s tricky for me to know when to move to the next region.
A full set of teeth is 32, and my toothbrush gives 96 seconds per brushing session, so a full cycle would allow for three seconds per tooth. Or, since I want to accomplish brushing the top, bottom, and the front of my teeth, I could allot 32 seconds to each of those regions.
But that’s too boring. So I go the first 24 seconds of the 96-second cycle with:
Eight seconds for the top teeth.
Eight seconds for the bottom teeth.
Eight seconds for the front of all my teeth.
Then with the remaining 72 seconds, I repeat the rotation, but with:
24 seconds for the top teeth.
24 seconds for the bottom teeth.
24 seconds for the front of all my teeth.
I measure the time in my head just counting to myself as I brush my teeth. It’s like a game to see how close I can come.
Guessing the Blood Sugar Level
By David Felt
For Type 1 diabetics, monitoring your blood sugar level is a 24/7/365 task. I have heard stories of people who can often guess their blood sugar within a few mg/dL.
Our 12-year-old daughter has been a diabetic for nearly seven years. She's not yet at the point where she can predict her blood sugar level without checking, but we often ask her to guess what it is without looking at her continuous glucose monitors so she can start to understand the signals her body is sending.
Getting Just the Right Amount of Dipping Sauce
By Marty Hick
I consider myself to be somewhat spatially gifted, so I’m in constant pursuit of precision. For example, if I’m eating a food that’s going to be dipped in a sauce, I always try to put the exact amount of dipping sauce that’s needed on my plate. This allows for some cheating, because you can always adjust just how much an item is dipped to match the amount of sauce, but I try to be honest with myself.
Also, I grab boxes for my groceries when I shop at Aldi. I always try to grab just the right boxes to fit my items perfectly. It becomes a game of Tetris, and I am usually successful.
Guessing the Total Grocery Bill
By Dave Hutte
When I’m grocery shopping, I do my own showcase showdown at the cash register. I develop a vague guess in my head as my wife and I shop, and then at the checkout I tell my wife what I think the total will be. I’m usually within two dollars. I get mad at myself when I’m five dollars over, always happy when I’m under!
Dispensing the Correct Number of Pills
By Jim Lanham
I currently take 13 different pills. My weekly contest while filling my daily pill dispenser is to pour the correct number of pills into my hand — 7 or 14, depending on whether it’s a medication that I take once or twice per day — for distribution into the day and night dispensers of my pill organizer. I've gotten reasonably good at it, hitting the correct number (or maybe just one off) about half of the time.
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By Ilana Hardesty
Every two weeks I set out my two seven-day pill boxes and my various bottles of pills and supplements. With each pill, it is my special challenge to see if I can shake out exactly 14, so that they can go into the little containers perfectly.
Also, I imagine many of us try to gauge the volume of any given leftover, in order to find the just-right container to store it in the fridge. No? Just me?
Guessing the Time in the Middle of the Night
By Jimmy Lonetti
As a kid, whenever I woke up in the middle of the night, I would try to guess the exact time displayed on my digital clock. After probably several years, one night I guessed 2:11. (I usually guessed a time with :11, since 11 was my lucky number and uniform number as a youth.) Bingo — exactly right! I had to make sure I wasn’t dreaming and continued to check the clock minutes after my guess. After seeing 2:12, 2:13, etc., I fell back to sleep knowing I’d finally done it.
I told my parents the next morning and I can’t say they shared my enthusiasm for the accomplishment, but I will always be fond the time of 2:11am. If I happen to be up late at an event or something (not so much nowadays!), I always make sure to notice the time of 2:11 displayed on a digital clock, microwave, or whatever and recall my miraculous guess.
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By Shirley Tobias
When I wake up during the night, I try to guess what time it is before checking the clock. The closer I am, the more satisfying it is. I don’t know how long I’ve been doing this, but it feels like forever.
Using Up the Full Meal Credit Without Going Over
By Stacy Rodgers
As a post-pandemic bribe/incentive to get employees to come into the office, my company started offering a $15 lunch credit/allowance at the in-house cafeteria. I know I’m not the only one who games to get the maximum value without going over the allotted amount. If you do go over, the excess is billed to your credit card, but with an annoying quirk: If you go over by less than a dollar, the app defaults to changing an additional dollar to that amount. So if you go 24 cents over, you’re charged $1.24 (whereas if you’re $1.02 over, you’re just charged $1.02). Yesterday I reached a perfect 15. I sent my co-worker a text, as he’s in on the game as well!
Singing Along When the Radio Signal Cuts Out
By Shawn Sweeney
When I’m driving, there are certain spots on the highway where my car’s satellite radio always cuts out. I usually find myself singing along to the song that was playing so that I’m in the correct spot when the signal comes back. Despite playing the drums for most of my life, I always tend to rush and be ahead of the lyrics when they come back on.
Measuring Liquid by the Sound It Makes
By John Vahey
We have 18-month-old twin girls, so we make up a lot of baby bottles, some in the middle of the night. We heat the milk in a white porcelain creamer in the microwave, and then the tricky part comes when the milk is warm and ready to pour into bottles. We of course want the same amount in each bottle, so as not to play favorites and to avoid having to pour from one bottle into the other.
My wife and I have noticed that we both use sound to judge how much milk goes into each bottle, and it’s a surprisingly accurate indicator. When the milk is pouring into the bottle, the sound it makes increases in pitch as the bottle fills, because the empty space between the top of the milk and the bottle neck gets smaller. Even in near-darkness, we can generally get better than half-ounce accuracy by filling the first bottle to a particular sound pitch and then moving on to the second bottle. And if the sound doesn’t match when the creamer empties, we know we are off.
Knowing the Time Without Wearing a Watch
By Amy Waterbury
For years I didn’t wear a watch and I’m not a big phone user, so I’d rely on asking whoever I was with what time it was. I liked to guess before they told me, and I had a weird knack for getting it exactly right (“Yes, it is, in fact, 2:37!”).
Similarly, on family road trips, before GPS was a thing, early in the trip we’d all guess our arrival time to see who could get the closest.
To nail it in either of these scenarios was pure delight!
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By Bob Whitmore
In the late 1980s, when I was in my early 20s, I got into the habit of compulsively checking the time. Like, every minute. I’d look at my watch, then forget, then look again, and again, and again. It had to stop, so I stopped wearing my watch. But I still needed to know the time, because I took a commuter train to work every day. How to do it without a watch?
Basically just by thinking really hard. I'd make a guess based on the last known time reference I had (NPR newscast was at 8:01, say, or I remember seeing it was 7:15 when I left the office). Then I’d immediately critique my guess and make a revised guess, then a third guess in between those two, then another, then another, and finally the guesses would converge in my head on a specific minute. Then I’d go find out the real time if I could. My final guess was usually within a few minutes, and often I nailed it to the minute, even if my last known reference was more than a couple of hours ago. SO satisfying!
The process became hardwired and instinctive. The multiple guesses happened on mental autopilot and the only guess I was conscious of was the final time estimate that popped into my head. It took maybe two seconds of real time. I had become my own timepiece.
I’m now approaching 60 and mostly work from home, so I can’t do it reliably anymore. But in my prime? I was really good.
Opening a Book to the Exact Page
By Mike Wilson
In school, when a teacher would tell us to open our textbooks to, say, page 162, some friends and I would go down the side of the closed textbook, guess the point where we thought page 162 was, then open it, hoping we got it exactly right.
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Paul here. I love these stories! Hope you enjoyed them too. Super-duper thanks to everyone who participated (and apologies for the editing that was needed to keep some of them at a manageable length).
Incidentally, two people submitted stories that were precision-related but, in my opinion, were really about aiming for a slightly different goal than precision. I will soon use those stories as the basis for another reader story solicitation — stay tuned.
Stick Figures in Peril, Continued
Granted, the stick figures on this porta-john are arguably not in true peril, but they’re certainly in discomfort. Reader Gabe Doman took that photo in Hamburg, Germany in 2016.
Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.
Singing Shawn Sweeney - I do the same, I've been a drummer for 20 years, I also speed it up. Wild.
(They call it downhill drumming for a reason, I guess)
And the time-guessers - I do the same and also am very good at it. People ask how I get so close or how I nailed the exact time, I tell them I use my shadow as a sundial. Sometime I tell them I'm kidding, sometimes I don't.
I too am a player of the pill-counting game. I have one pill I take three times a day, and I take a special amount of pride if I can dump out exactly all 21 pills into my hand.