Sooooo boooooored....

[jethrien]

So I'm out in the far depths of the E-Quad. Counting every single tooth on every single gear on my clock. I've been working for well over three hours, and I probably have at least another hour to go. Do you have any idea how amazingly boring it is to count gear teeth? And how hard it is to keep track of how many teeth you've counted on one gear once you're past 50?

Arrgh. So bored. Going to pass out and bonk head on table from boredom.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

You need one of those clicker counter things they use to take headcounts in large crowds. And how do you know you're not counting around and around the same gear?

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Because I'm drawing little lines in pencil on one tooth and counting around until I get back to it.

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

Hmm. How did the clockmakers do this, back in the day? Or did they have apprentices to do the counting?

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Tediously. Or they got their apprentices to do it, yes.

It still beats the hell out of plowing in the rain, or being a seaman and not seeing land for six months, or being a scullery maid, or many of the other job options at the time.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

It's indoor work with no heavy lifting, so I doubt they were likely to complain about the tedium. Heck, it was highly specialized technical work, so it probably paid well, to boot.

Totally different note: Jethrien posted this after I went to bed. Eight comments were posted to it by the time I got up. Does no one on Livejournal ever sleep? Or is my "real world" schedule just bizarre?

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

You go to bed ridiculously early, chuckro. Face the facts. You're a square.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

I'll agree with Jen on this one...of course, the "awake noon-4 AM" schedule isn't much healthier...

[shnayder.livejournal.com]

Something tells me this is a job for a digital camera and a computer program. But then, I'm a CS major.

Also, if it's symmetric, can't you just count half or a quarter and multiply?

Asking silly questions because I'm still at work myself... with no hope of leaving anytime soon.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Eh. It would probably have taken longer for me to write the program than count them by hand. I'm not a very good programmer.

And some of them have even and some of them have odd numbers of teeth. If there are 84 teeth on the gear, it's difficult to figure out whether there are an even or odd number, or exactly where the halfway point is without just counting them all. Again, it's doable, but it would probably take less time and effort to simply count them.

And I also needed to take all the diameters and proportions and everything anyway. It was going to take awhile one way or another.

[moooshy.livejournal.com]

wow.

i think there's 135.

melody "english major and proud" kramer

[dushai.livejournal.com]

Oops, you missed one. Better start over. :)

Okay, if I'm going to be a wise-ass, I might as well offer a potentially useful suggestion also. Here's an idea: Mark one tooth, as you've been doing. Then roll the gear firmly on a piece of paper, so that the teeth make distinct indentations. Label two indentations made by the marked gear, so that one full revolution is known to occur between the two labels. Then repeatedly fold the paper (accounting for possible odd numbers of indentations) until it's easy to count the indentations in a fold and multiply by the number of folds (adding one as appropriate). Might that save you some time and increase the accuracy, maybe?