Skypemathics

The first nonabsolute number is the number of people who will attend the conference call. This will vary during the course of the first three emails, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or to the number of people who subsequently join them after another meeting, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has turned up.

The second nonabsolute number is the start time of the conference call, which is now known to be one of those most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a recipriversexclusion, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the call will log on. Recipriversexclusions now play a vital part in many branches of maths, including statistics and accountancy and also form the basic equations used to engineer the Somebody Else's Problem field.

The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of actions in the minutes, the number of people in the conference call and what they are each prepared to be responsible for. (The number of people who actually have any responsibility is only a subphenomenon in this field.)

Numbers written on emails about conference calls do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other communications in any other parts of the universe.

With huge apologies to Douglas Adams.