700 million trillion

The tiebreaker question was: How many gallons of water are in the Quabbin Reservoir?

The closest answer would finish in third place. Our foursome coughed up answers ranging from 4,000 gallons – “it just popped in my head” – to way more than that. I pictured the Quabbin, which I flew over as a passenger in a small plane a few years ago. Definitely way more than that. They sank whole towns to make Boston’s water source, which looks like the blemish on M. Gorbachev’s scalp. The blemish times, like, a million trillion.

Our judgment was rushed by the trivia emcee, who wanted to get the tiebreaker over with so he could tell the crowd which team came in second and which team won. We panicked. I knew it must have been a lot more than 4,000 but really I had no idea. None of us did.

The other team was a round table full of women who were knitting. They were calm. It seemed like they had their answer very quickly. They won, though they were not close to right either. I’ve already forgotten the answer but it was in the many millions. I think it might have been in the hundreds of millions. When numbers attached to small things like gallons and those numbers reach into the millions, I simply lose all sense of scale.

In trying to make sense of the proposed Wall Street bailout, I’ve tried to make sense of $700 billion. It seems like an astonishingly high number to give to companies that coaxed people into thinking they could afford things they could not hold, like houses.

If I was Bush, Bernanke, Paulson and the other power brokers involved in this – do you get the sense they were like, eight sounds too close to a trillion and six isn’t enough, let’s call it seven? – I would have put the number out of reach. $700 million trillion. That’s serious. That makes me think, wow, we’re in a lot of trouble. But $700 billion? Come on. There’s probably three times that many gallons of water in Lake Okeechobee.

I should know, I’ve flown over that large body of water, too. It only took like ten minutes to fly over it. But it was a much bigger plane.