Do you remember that game you would play back in grade school where the teacher would ask the class to guess how many gumballs were in a jar and whoever had the closest guess would win all the gumballs? I was horrible at that game.

My guess would be something like eighty-five and the correct answer was always closer to four hundred. For as long as I can remember, I’ve never been able to look at something and estimate how many of that item are there. Not that I’m missing out on a vital life skill or am overly bitter at never winning the aforementioned game, but I’m amazed at my lack of ability, nonetheless.

Recently as I was enjoying some chocolate covered coffee beans (Yes, I relapsed ), I took a look at the nutrition information on the side. Imagine my shock when I saw that the recommended serving size for the coffee beans was forty pieces. By the time I had viewed this information, I had only eaten three of them and found myself completely wired and jittery from the caffeine and had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to sleep for the next week. If I were to sit and chomp down forty of these things then the evening was bound to end with my heart exploding in my chest.

This is where I bring the initial point of this column back around. I noticed that there were supposedly three and a half servings in the container. I’m no mathematician but I believe that three and a half servings would indicate that there were approximately one hundred forty beans in the bag. While looking at the container, my eyes did not calculate one hundred forty beans. Fifty seemed more accurate. That was my guess. That’s what I would have written on the little slip of paper and handed in to my teacher. That’s the number that would have lost me the game. This lack of being able to estimate the contents of a bag filled with round objects caused my reality to spin out of control and make an accusation at my girlfriend that the serving size printed on the bag had to be a mistake because there was no way that there were one hundred forty beans in the bag!

I suddenly began fearing for anyone else that may have purchased chocolate covered coffee beans from Starbucks and attempted to eat forty of them after being fooled by the false facts listed on the box. I began to suspect that the real serving size may have actually been just two coffee beans and I had potentially overdosed. Should I induce vomiting? Should I go to a doctor? My world was a lie, the bag was a lie, and I just stood there, unable to estimate the amount of beans and too scared to empty the bag and count them one by one. Before I knew it I had gone into a full on caffeine-fueled flurry of confusion and extreme paranoia. My eyes began darting around the room looking for answers. They landed on a jar of jellybeans on the table. My brain started its feeble attempts at calculating. It was right around that time that I blacked out.

When I awoke I realized that on my trip to the floor I had knocked over the bag of chocolate covered coffee beans and was now surrounded by a small brown army of irony. As I picked them up, I counted them one by one. In the end there were exactly one hundred thirty-seven. I had lost the game. Again.

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