Billie Holiday's telling me it's summertime, Lois confirms, I'm a believer.

I've been thinking about numbers, as a natural phenomenon, much like the languages that we speak, that messages, feelings and concepts need to be relayed and delivered. It is what it is, it has to be so.

I was nursing a bad hangover a couple of weeks ago and was trying not to contemplate anything while I sought some kind of normality in my caffè latte and croissant stuffed with Tallegio and Prosciutto.

All over the office, on every usable space, posters have been put up. A man standing with his arms folded, in his cubicle and it sais 'The CEO of cubicle 36, building 10'; being hungover I was searching for the significance of the numbers. 36 has a square root, 6? But where does 10 come in to it?

We work on a base 10 number system, more commonly known as decimal. We can alter our number systems to base 6, base 8, base 9 and so on. Different patterns appear in the numbers and strange, unseen things can be done with them. Many number tricks just make use of changing the base, and can leave you feeling confounded. We use this altering of number systems in programming computers, changing the way bits are moved and how.

Then it dawned on me, in a base 10 number system, the sum of the consecutive numbers from 1 through 36, so 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 ... 36 = 666. Test it for yourself. Now, the main component of our software is something called Cube processing, the data is fetched into a cube, and can then be manipulated much the same way as a Rubics cube. A cube has three dimensions, x, y and z. The square root of 36 only left us with 2 6's. 666 not only gives us the infamous number, but it gives us the dimensions of a 6 unit cube; cube processing, cubicle 36.

I left my coffee and croissant immediately and took one of the new starters at work upstairs to meet HR. HR wasn't there, so I had a chat with the recruitment consultant. I looked down and what did he have on his keyring. 666. Printed right there on his keyring. This was one instance of the number too much for such a short space of time. Feeling out of kilter I went outside to smoke, to fray my nerves even further. Robin walks out, on his t-shirt i see 6...6... oh christ, please no ...5; 665, neighbour of the beast. I laugh, that was close I tell him and I tell him my half-baked realisation and the the sudden oddity of numbers. He laughs and tells me that he's just been to the post office and that the guy in front of him had a t-shirt on that said 666. Robin pointed out that they were neighbours.

I did some reseach into numerology and the mysticism of certain numbers or combinations of them. On 07/07/2005 London was attacked. Look at the date, 0+7/0+7/2+0+0+5 = 7/7/7. OK I thought, so what's the significance? In both the Quran and the Torah those numbers are significant, God, Heaven and Earth each add up to 7. Business Objects adds up to 11, which is a master number, in numerology there are 3 master numbers, 11, 22 and 33. 11 is a master number because that's where Messiah and Lucifer reside, along with Business Objects, now I found that quite funny.

Yesterday I got an email from Andrew, telling me the following:

He was driving his wife, sister-in-law and kids to town, he looked at the odometer and pointed out that it was on 7773. As they rolled up to the traffic light, the final 7 clicked into place and the people in the car errupted with cheers, 7777 on the odometer. Andrew looked up, looked at the registration of the car in front of him, it read s777. Holy crap, Andrew thought, that's seven 7s. It was suggested that they play the lottery that night.

That was yesterday, 16/07/2005. Let's look at that, 1+6/0+7/2+0+0+5 = 7/7/7. He bought 7 random rows of numbers for the lottery.

Now let's look at the winners. The match 5 lottery had 7 winners, each one of them wins £234, 547. Add those digits together. 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 4 + 7 = 25. 25, well 2 + 5 = 7

Sadly, Andrew was not one of the winners, although He did have every number, but in each line that he had bought. He'll never play again, you don't get spoken to like that.