A bedtime story.

I am the lead curator for a museum of rare and exotic artifacts from all over the world.

To keep track of these artifacts, I give them each a number—there are a lot of things I take care of, after all.

The number is pretty much random, though I come up with a fun system for my own amusement and for passersby to appreciate when they see things on display. The lower the number, the earlier I took these items into my care.

The artifacts themselves are brought in each day, and each new artifact is tagged with the next ID number in my book. I call it, the ledger.

One day, I noticed that one of my junior curators forgot to catalogue a box from an incoming shipment I received three months ago! Oh no! I mean, it's not the biggest deal. I could just mark the date I got them, but I was quite enjoying this whole ID number thing and seems my guests enjoyed the novelty of it too.

Ok, how about this. If I ever find a missed box of items, I'll just give them.... negative numbers? Maybe a little cursed, but sure, let's try that. That way, I don't have to spend all the time fitting them into my ledger (even though they did come in back then).

A few months go by and I realize that there are a lot of other scenarios where I keep missing shipments. Now the negative numbers are getting just as complicated to keep track of as fixing my ledger in the first place. Dang.

Ok, let's fix this once and for all. We're going to switch to a new, upgradable, shiny, electronic ledger which will allow me to fix these shipments as soon as I identify them. Maybe I can even hook it up so that as soon as the order is received, it's scanned and organized immediately by the date and time it was received.

The items within each box can be numbered in a specific order too, perhaps their date of manufacture.

Now, I can keep track of just a single ledger and I can upgrade it over time. If I decide in the future that I want to start keeping track of other items we've had in storage but not part of the main collection, I can easily add those in (still based on the date and time they were received) but not impact anything else.

Because after all, the whole novelty of these numbers is seeing when I actually received these items—not when I recorded them in my book.

And maybe when all is said and done, I can remind myself that the special thing isn't these numbers at all, but the rare and exotic artifacts I treasure.

Sweet dreams.