The standard automobile license plate in the State of South Dakota has six digits. The first one or two digits designate the county in which the automobile is registered. The second or third digit is generally a letter. The remaining digits are numbers until a county has used all of the letter and number combinations afforded by the space. Then a subsequent digit is also assigned a letter. This system provides a unique number for each automobile registered in the state.

We love numbering things. We have numbers for our bank accounts, our credit cards, the accounts we have with doctors. We have numbers for our addresses, for multiple telephones and fax machines. We have serial numbers on the items we purchase and personal identification numbers for the bank. We have combination locks and computer passwords that involve numbers.

Most of us have a reasonable ability to remember multiple numbers. I used to be good at telephone numbers. I can still recite the phone numbers of my childhood home and of most of the places I have lived since then. I know the number for the church, our home, our cell phones, and a few others. But these days we store numbers in the memories of our phones and there is less need to have memorized numbers in our brains. I call people by selecting their name from a list these days. My cell phone even has a way to look up the numbers that I haven’t stored in its memory so I rarely use a conventional telephone book any more.

There is a bit of brain science in our telephone numbers. A phone number is ten digits, which is a number that most people can retain in short term memory. A longer string of digits might make it more difficult for the average person to dial the number. Except, of course, we don’t “dial” numbers any more. The use of that term belongs to the technology of the past.

But there are plenty of numbers that are too long to easily learn or memorize.

I was thinking about numbers yesterday as I filled out the paperwork to obtain a Hull Identification Number for the rowboat that I am building in my garage. I learned about Hull Identification Numbers shortly after I moved to South Dakota. I was launching my canoe at Deerfield Lake when an officer of the South Dakota Fish, Game and Parks Commission approached me and informed me that I could not paddle on the lake without having first registered my boat. Unlike the other states in which I had previously lived, South Dakota requires registration of all boats over 12 feet in length regardless of design or method of propulsion. In other states, non-motorized canoes and kayaks are exempt from registration.

I went to the courthouse to register the boat, where I was informed that I needed to have a hull identification number permanently affixed to the boat, have that number inspected by a South Dakota Peace Officer, and bring a form certifying that the boat had been inspected back to the court house where I could pay the fee and obtain a license for the boat. Then I would be issued a different set of numbers and letters to affix to the bow of the boat and a boat license with yet another number.

I was not very happy with having to affix all of these numbers to a hand-made cedar strip canoe. I asked if this procedure was required of a factory-made boat and was informed that the manufacturer assigns a Serial Number at the factory that can be used. Since I am familiar with Old Town Canoes, I know that Old Town Serial Numbers are simple numbers stamped into the wooden stem of the canoe. I suggested that my canoe was serial number 1 because it was the first canoe I had made and I intended to make others. My attempt at humor was not appreciated by the person at the DMV, who had a long line of others waiting to see her. I was curtly informed that my Hull Identification Number had to follow a specific formula.

I sighed, grumbled a bit beneath my breath, and went through the procedure. I have gone through the procedure, with a bit less grumbling and a lot less time taken from the harried DMV employees, for each boat that I have built since, with the exception of one kayak that I shortened to 11 feet 11 inches just to avoid having to go through the procedure.

There can’t possibly be enough boats in South Dakota to require 12 digits to assign a unique number to each boat. With that scheme, the state could theoretically register 999,999,999,999 boats before having to use a letter. One letter in the formula for each trillion boats means that the state would literally fill up with boats and have no room for anything else before they ran out of numbers. Counting, however, would be too simple for the state. The first three designators of the HIN are the state designator. Never mind that the Post Office can identify all 50 states with two digits, when it comes to boats, South Dakota wants each to begin with “SDZ.” I have no idea what the Z stands for. That is followed by 5 digits that are numbers and letters assigned by the state. This is the part of the number that is presumably unique. The remaining four digits are for the date in which the boat was completed, or in the case of boats brought in from other states without hull identification numbers, the date the boat arrived in South Dakota. There is one digit for the month. The state has assigned letters for each month. Then, for reasons that escape me, the formula specifies that you use the last digit of the current year followed by the last two digits of the current year. So 2012 is assigned 212. I guess they aren’t worried that their year numbers repeat every century.

So this entire blog has been a rant about the absurdity of numbers. And I haven’t even begun to wonder why business account numbers are so long.

At least I can still remember my social security number. If each state issued their own numbers who knows how many digits that might require?

Copyright © 2012 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.