I'm a huge nerd.

I'm moving into a new office next week. Actually, my whole department is moving. And before we move in, I want to paint the office. I don't like the sterile white walls it has now, and i want to give it a little color. So I've spent the last couple days picking out a paint color, washing the walls, and this morning I needed to calculate how much paint I needed. There are probably several easy ways to do this, but I am, as my title explains, a huge nerd. For the walls, I measured the height of the ceiling and then measured each wall. There are several walls in the office, so i measured each one and multiplied its length by the height. That gave me the square footage for the walls. But I'm thinking I might paint the ceiling too. In that case, I really need the square footage for the ceiling as well. So what did I do? I drew a diagram!!! Here it is:




After filling out the dimensions of each wall, I divided the room into three rectangular sections, took their area, then added all three together. That combined with the area from the walls gave me the entire square footage.

The funny part about all this is that in my previous life, when I was a math teacher at Bentonville High School, I taught this exact lesson to my Geometry students. We probably even used a shape that looked just like this one. This is the part where the math teacher, vindicated from all the years of listening to, "This is pointless, we're never going to use this. Why do we have to learn this? I hate math! No one uses math but math teachers, blah, blah, blah, whine, whine, whine..." says, HAHA, SUCKERS! EAT THAT! Have a super day, and hug a math teacher today! :)