How long would it take to count one trillion shillings?
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
27 June 2010
Every time a large number comes into the national scene, people start wondering whether it is possible to count to it. From the day that the trillion shilling budget was read, this debate has been going on in The Watchman column of the Nation. Let me put it plain and simple: it is not possible for a human being to count to one trillion!
I wrote about this matter on 25th March 2007. At that time, I was tackling the question of counting to a billion. I demonstrated that while one count small numbers very quickly, the counting speed goes down one goes higher; and it is not because of fatigue. For example, time yourself as you count from 999,999,990 to 1,000,000,000.
You must say the numbers in full; the first one is “nine hundred and ninety nine million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety”; the second one is “nine hundred and ninety nine million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety one”; and so on.
Now continue until you reach the 1,000,000,000 (one billion) and see how long that will take you. In the 2007 article, I demonstrated that it would take about 500 years to finish counting to one billion. This is much longer than the average life of a human being.
It follows then, that if a human being cannot count to a billion, she obviously can’t reach a trillion! Since the trillion were concerned with here is 1,000 billion, we can estimate that it would take at least 500,000 years to count to that number. However, taking the arguments of the previous article into consideration, I wouldn’t be surprised if it took more than 5 million years. I won’t go into the details because that would be repetitive.
Today, I shall take a different angle: the Minister for Finance was talking about money – Kenyan shillings, to be exact. So I will ask whether it is possible to count Sh1,000,000,000,000.
Now, the largest Kenyan currency note is worth Sh1,000. Therefore, we need one billion such notes to make a trillion shillings.
Money is easier to count than plain numbers. We normally do it in groups of ten notes and then pack these into bundles of ten groups – thereby making bundles of 100 notes. In this kind of packing, we need 10 million bundles of 100 notes to make one trillion shillings.
A long time ago, I worked as a cashier in shop for several years and I learnt how count notes very fast by hand. In fact, with the advent of the counting machines in banks, I am quite certain that there are very few tellers who can count cash faster than me.
Any way; I estimate that I can count 100 notes in about 25 seconds. Therefore, it would take me a total of 250 million seconds to count the trillion shillings. That is, about 70,000 hours. If I worked 8 hours per day and took two hours of breaks for lunch and refreshment, this job would take me 11,500 days.
Suppose further that I only work five days per week; that is, 250 days per year. The job would then last about 46 years. Can I finish it? Well, that’s a story for another day.
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