School started up at the end of August and in an attempt to simultaneously improve my life, collect funds from the federal government and stop my family and friends from constantly inquiring about my future I enrolled in a few credits worth of classes, bought some mechanical pencils and found a community college that would allow me in, looking the way I do. Having some small interest in engineering led me into an algebra class and I thought, "Self, maybe Precalculus is a good place to find something to count so that we can finally finish up Counting together." Well, I don't know much about mathematics. If I did, I wouldn't have to take a college algebra course, right? But one thing I do know is the Fine Art of Listening. I've been one Hell of a listener for a good long time. I tend to notice things like mispronunciation, accents and verbal ticks. Incidentally, the word like drives me up the fucking wall. I lucked out when my math instructor, who we'll call Erich, displayed a fairly blatant tick on the first day.

Now I don't know if this is something that Erich picked up over the years teaching math, alright, or if it's something he got from a friend or family member, alright, but he had this insidious habit, okay? Maybe it was a result of the natural nervousness that comes from speaking in front of a group of people, alright, or maybe Erich is a little more clever than that, okay? Maybe Erich keeps repeating the words "alright" and "okay" as interrogative placeholders in order to maintain the attention of a room full of postadolescents who aren't powerfully interested in math. Yeah? Regardless of the truth, the fact is that Erich says these words a lot.

But how much?

I counted his alrights and okays over the course of four classes and then marked what time class ended on each of those days. I wanted to procure an audio recording of Erich's verbal tick, but I'm not about to record someone without letting them know and I thought that if he knew I was recording his lectures he might want to know why. And then I would have to tell him. And then he would probably be a lot more mindful of his tick. So...

On 9/2, Erich said 123 Alrights and 23 Okays for a total of 146 Ticks. Class ended at 11:18, so assuming that it started between 10:00 and 10:05 we've got 146 Ticks in 78 minutes (and we'll say plus or minus five minutes to sound more scientific but I'm not going to mess with it beyond the way that it sounds cool).
That's about 1.58 Alrights every minute and that's assuming that Erich is constantly talking. He actually breathes, too. You throw in the Okays and that's 1.87 Ticks per minute.

On 9/7, Erich took it up a notch with 150, yes, that's one Hundred and Fifty Alrights. Class ended at 11:14, so it was four minutes shorter. Even though the Alrights were ramped up, the Okays held fast at a total count of 23. That's a total of 173 Ticks in 74 minutes. That's around 2.33 Ticks per minute, or an Alright or Okay every 25 seconds or so, assuming Erich wasn't breathing.

9/9: 112 Alrights and 40 Okays in 76 minutes. Looks like Erich went on an Okay streak here. 152 Ticks in 76 minutes gives you 2 Ticks per minute or a twitch on my face every thirty seconds.

9/12, the next Monday, we've got only 90 Alrights and 22 Okays. The catch? A quiz! The part of class where Erich was regularly speaking ended after only 60 minutes. Check my math, but it looks like Erich's average reset over the weekend. About 1.87 Ticks per minute.

So after those four classes we stopped reviewing and I started paying attention to the numbers instead of the words. I bet if you enrolled today and got in you'd find these averages to stand pretty firm. The bottom line is that Erich says "Alright?" a whole Hell of a lot. But probably not as much as the majority of his students say "like."

I fucking hate that word.