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Can You Spare A Googol?

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By STEVE OTTO

sotto@tampatrib.com

Published: March 6, 2009

Most of us can't really conceive of just how much money a trillion dollars is. I know it's a "1" with 12 zeros after it, but it's hard to get a handle on how much space that much cash would take up. I keep thinking of those old comic books with Disney's Scrooge McDuck. He kept all his money in a vault that looked like a swimming pool full of dollars. My guess is even Scrooge McDuck didn't have that much cash in his vault.

It was always a million that was the ultimate number used in anything. "I wouldn't date you in a million years!" was the line I got.

There used to be this great TV show called "The Millionaire." Every week this fictional millionaire would send his man out to give someone a million dollars. The show would revolve around what happened to the recipient. It usually wasn't all that good.

Of course a million isn't what it used to be. I've been reading about baseball players turning down multimillion-dollar contracts that are bigger than the budgets of some countries. These days, when we talk about rich people they had better be in the billionaire class.

Number Of The Year

Now the number of the year is a trillion. Not just a trillion, but lots of trillions. There must be such a number because we are giving it to all those institutions running our financial systems because they are so good with money.

What worries me - well, lots of things worry me - but one of them is that if a trillion is in our budgets, can the next great number be far behind?

I looked it up and after a trillion we'd better get ready for a quadrillion. That's the number "1" with 15 zeros after it. Don't you wonder how far into the future it is going to be before the first quadrillion-dollar quarterback signs?

It will go on, hopefully after we're long gone, to the googol, which will have 100 zeros tagging behind it, and finally to a centillion, which has 303 zeros.

Stranger At TIA

Sometimes you don't need a billion or a trillion dollars; just enough money to get home. Robin Dollman passes this along from an incident earlier this week at Tampa International, where she was "traveling to Miami with my 4-year-old daughter. I do not travel by air often, let alone without my husband.

"Typically I am a person who plans every detail and arrives excessively early. Once I made it through security at TIA I went to retrieve cash from my carry-on to purchase breakfast and found I had left all my cash and debit card at home. Panic overwhelmed me.

"I struck up a conversation with a mom of a toddler about all the things you don't forget to bring as a mom and then how I forgot something as important as cash.

"Just then a businessman, who had overhead my conversation, walked over and handed me forty dollars with his business card and said to write a check when I got home. He picked up his newspaper and walked away. It was the kindness of a stranger, a simple gesture, that shows there are still good people in this world."

She gave me his name and I put in a call to Ronald Heimburger of Riverview. He called me back a few minutes later from Kansas City, where he is visiting a sick relative. Heimburger usually is dong his good deeds with animals as a member of a volunteer pet disaster relief team that helps with abandoned animals in disasters.

It was, as numbers go, a small amount. The size of the spirit is more difficult to measure.

Keyword: Otto Graphs, for more of Steve Otto's musings.

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