It was a cold, wintry night that July 27 eve. At least that was what the architect told himself it felt like as he filled his coffee cup with a bit more schnapps than usual, and refilling it a little more often. The truth was he was suffering from Raynaud’s Phenomenon and didn’t know even know it. Someone had left the A/C vent open in his office, which left the poor undiagnosed engineer with the chills. So he had no choice, but to fill his stomach with the warm peppermint delight.

There was another reason that he was a little more liberal with his schnapps that evening though. The plans for Houston Hall were almost finished. The equations had been written, the letters were solved, the lines were drawn, the only task that lay before him was to simply count in a row. The numbering of the rooms.

“This is the easiest part of the job,” he thought while sipping his coffee and flipping through architect weekly.

Although he seemingly flew through this task, he quickly realized the numbers were askew. As he became more and more aware of just how intoxicated he was, he pushed to rearrange the rooms, but soon found himself passed out on the floor.

It was now July 28.

“A brand new day,” the disoriented and dizzy architect thought to himself. He would make a steaming pot of coffee and schnapps and try another round with these numbers. He wrote one number, then another and another. He was doing well thus far, until he went to refill his coffee.

The poor architect had forgotten all about the leak in the ceiling and slipped on the wet floor. He couldn’t brace himself on the way down and was once again knocked out on the cold, wet floor.

That afternoon, the architect’s boss arrived to the office to look at what he presumed to be the finished design of Houston Hall. Much to his surprise, he found the architect still on the floor.

“I need to stop hiring drunks,” the boss muttered to himself.

He also realized he did not have time to write in all of the numbers in a scientific way. So he grabbed two dice out of his drawer (he had them because he had a gambling problem and never knew when he’d need a spare pair) and sat down with the blue prints.

The boss did not hesitate to throw 7’s and 11’s. He quickly began to fill in the numbers with his loaded crap dice. Before he knew it, the numbers were filled in, but his heart was still empty.

He decided to take all of the room numbers, divide by 2.3, add 8 and multiply by 12. After rounding the end results to whole numbers, he left us with the sporadic numbering scheme we have today.

tfife@mavs.coloradomesa.edu