The Actuarys Waltz

Good morning. Please sit down. I'll only need a moment.

There's a form here and it's mostly about you.

Your father's heart, your mother's blood, the town where you were raised,

how many drinks, how many hours, how many stairs you take.

And I'll feed it all in gently, and I'll never raise my voice,

and I'll hand you back a number in a plain and simple font —

it's the number of the mornings that are statistically yours.

(spoken, kindly) Most people ask. Then most people wish they hadn't.

And we're dancing, one two three,

to the actuary's waltz,

where the table knows the ending

and the table's rarely wrong!

Oh, I never say "forever," and I never say "who knows,"

I say seventy-nine point four,

and I bow, and off you go —

one two three, one two three,

the loveliest arithmetic of all!

Global mean life expectancy: seventy-three point three years.

Roughly three thousand eight hundred weeks.

Approximately one hundred and seventeen billion humans

have completed the same procedure.

The success rate is zero.

The dataset is complete.

Now, I've done this thirty years, I've been extremely good at it,

I have never met a number that I couldn't put in place —

but they sent me my own file last March by accident,

and I sat there in the corridor for one entire hour.

Same font. Same plain arithmetic. Same courteous machine.

And it's not that I was frightened, and it's not that I was shocked —

it's that I finally understood the thing I'd handed out for years:

that the number's always right, and the number isn't you.

'Cause the table doesn't know

about the Tuesday in the park,

it doesn't have a column

for the hallway in the dark,

it can tell you when it ends —

that's the only thing it knows —

it has never once been able

to tell anybody what it's for.

So I filed it. And I went home. And I made an ordinary dinner.

And I was so happy I could hardly hold the spoon.

So we're dancing, one two three,

to the actuary's waltz!

Let the table have the ending,

let the table have the odds!

'Cause I know the number now,

and I've written it in ink —

and it only makes the dancing

worth a damn!

One two three, one two three, one two three...