Last night I couldn’t sleep. No big thing, it’s some­thing I’ve always had; the brain just tends to be a little over­act­ive at 3am. I’ve always dealt with it in dif­fer­ent ways, all with vary­ing degrees of suc­cess. last night how­ever, I real­ised that I’ve never actu­ally tried that old staple of sleep­less­ness cures, count­ing sheep.

“No big­gie” I thought to myself “I can count sheep”. So I settled in. I pic­tured them per­fectly; a bleat­ing, woolly mass of wool, slot­ted eyes and hooves — at a guess, I’d have said there must have been  a couple of thou­sand of them — and every single one of them had yet to be accoun­ted for.

I star­ted simply. As each sheep passed me by into the Imaginary Pen I had cre­ated, the num­bers increased by 1.

“1, 2, 3, 4″

So this was count­ing sheep, eh?

“5, 6, 7..”

Hmm. Surely there’s an easier way to do this. Increasing the num­ber of sheep by one is well and good — but what hap­pens if I lose count? And surely simply count­ing the num­ber of sheep isn’t enough? What if the Imaginary Farmer who’s Imaginary Sheep I was count­ing wanted more inform­a­tion about his Imaginary Flock?

I looked to my col­lect­ing Pen, and divided it into a series of SubPens, each labelled after a breed of sheep. There seemed to be a LOT of breeds, and I wasn’t really sure how many there were — so I simply resolved to add a new SubPen each time a new Imaginary Breed showed up.

The task was get­ting a little more com­plic­ated now, but order was being restored — the Sheep were now not only being coun­ted, but indexed nicely. The pro­cess was tem­por­ar­ily inter­rup­ted by the fact that an Imaginary Goat had some­how been mali­ciously inser­ted into the flock — so I ima­gined up a ‘type’ fil­ter at the Gate that would fil­ter the Goats from the Sheep; and then sub­divided the Pens to allow for each animal type that appeared.

I ran a few optim­isa­tion tasks that added a bit of extra ‘meat-information’ to each animal’s ear tag about it’s spe­cific diet, fat-content and age to make the butchery pro­cess a little easier. Once again, a bit more over­head on the over­all pro­cesses, but would be worth it in the long run.

I’ll be hon­est, by this time I was start­ing to lose count — all the cat­egor­ising and fil­ter­ing was get­ting in the way. So I employed an Imaginary Helper to keep track of the count­ing for me, giv­ing me more time to con­cen­trate on the main task at hand.

It was around then that I real­ised that the rams and the ewes were all in the same pens and were start­ing to get… frisky. *Sigh* Another sub­di­vi­sion of the pens in each Animal/Breed into ‘Ewes’ and ‘Rams’, and time out to rec­at­egor­ise the sheep I’d already done. Whilst I was at it, I added some extra inform­a­tion to each sheep’s ear tag, record­ing when the last time it was coun­ted, and their parentage.

The sheep count­ing con­tin­ued again, the Helper adding extra inform­a­tion being added, and the anim­als them­selves being added to their respect­ive pens by me. The Helper was get­ting tired by this point doing the count­ing and the assign­ing of extra inform­a­tion, and wanted to do me to bring in some extra assist­ance to spread the load.

By the end of the res­ult­ing Strike Negotiations I had 15 dif­fer­ent help­ers, each with a dif­fer­ent task, and their own Helpers’ Union. I was still try­ing to ima­gine up new con­tain­ing pens for the seem­ingly never end­ing vari­ety of Imaginary Sheep breeds — and I was start­ing to sus­pect that some of the Pens were being need­lessly duplic­ated — I mean, is there really a need to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between the ‘Cheviot’ and the ‘Border Cheviot’?¹

The next animal that came up wasn’t an Imaginary Sheep or Goat.. I don’t really know what it was — maybe an Alpaca? Whatever it was, it clearly could have gone in either Breed Pen. This was clearly get­ting out of hand. Time to reassess.

Maybe it would be bet­ter to simply put all that cat­egor­isa­tion inform­a­tion onto their ear tags and not put them in seper­ate pens. Apart from the Rams and Ewes, the horny bug­gers… and prob­ably the sick look­ing ones — whatever’s wrong with those I don’t want spread­ing around the rest of the Imaginary Flock… Hmm. If I’m start­ing afresh, I should prob­ably incor­por­ate some of these fancy new ways of access­ing Imaginary Sheep data from your mobile device. Probably add in some social aspects from Flockbook and MyFleece whilst I’m at it…

The next morn­ing, I got abso­lutely no sleep whate­so­ever, and the Helper’s Union had refused to give me the final tally until their salary demands had been met.

Next time I want to sleep, I’m just going to use tablets.

¹ Who’s with me sheep farm­ers? Eh? EH?