devil number

I check my blog a few times a week just to see if anybody commented. My life is ordinary and filled with ordinary things, so I rarely have anything interesting to blog about.  I’m pretty sure my kids (maybe even only one of my kids now) are the only people who ever read my blog.  Anyway, I looked at my blog and it said 666 people have looked at my blog in the past month.  My first thought was like “OH!!  It’s a sign from the devil!”  How silly is that!  My brain has been conditioned by movies and books like The Omen.  I loved that movie!  Damien was so cute, but evil to the core.  He had a 666 birthmark hidden by his hair..I wonder how many people got a tattoo of that after the movie was released? 

I found this reference: “Let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number, its number is six hundred and sixty-six." (Revelation 13:16-18 KJV). So, 666 is supposed to somehow represent the mark of the devil. Really? It seems like somebody as powerful as Satan could have come up with something more creative than that. But really, I like scary movies as long as they’re not too gory or stupid. Unfortunately, many of them are just plain stupid. The Exorcist..that was a good one. The first time I tried to watch that was from the backseat at a drive-in movie in the winter (with windows fogged up). It was a double-date and I had no interest in the boy I was with. The couple in the front seat were making out (blocking my view) and my date wanted to make out – ugh. I just wanted to watch the movie.

So, I do remember one more 666 story. When vessels are built within a refinery, they are assigned a number. It’s a big deal because that number appears on all the engineering drawings, work orders, certification documentation, etc. So, at one of our refineries, we built four new tanks. These were numbered sequentially, 665, 666, 667, and 668. This was like 20 years ago, and in those days, the gages were installed on the tops of the tanks and we didn’t have automated gages on many tanks back then either. Every morning, a crew of gagers climbed every tank to read the gages. The problem was, nobody wanted to climb tank 666 – the gagers thought it was bad luck.  It became such a problem, that management changed the tank number and paid to have all the drawings referencing that tank to be done over.  I had to make changes to a couple of systems I supported for the new tank number, which is how I learned about the story.