For I made so many mistakes trying to work the challenges of arithmetic at school (or whatever the numbers game is called today) that had I learned from each of them I should now have my name inscribed on the Hollywood Walk of Calculus Fame.
I could not learn from my arithmetical mistakes but I quickly learned how to use a calculator when they eventually emerged on the scene.
For a numbers-challenged individual like me they are right up there with effective bottle openers.
So yep, no one will ever know everything, although there are people out there who do believe they know everything and when caught out by something mutter something along the lines of "oh that's just another way of looking at it".
I mentioned the knowledge pursuit of The Chase earlier and this sparkling little daily outing is both enlightening and educational.
I like the challenge of trying to answer things, because it is a challenge wrapped in time constraints.
Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.
Herein lies another common saying (made more common if you get entangled in The Chase) and that is "ooh hang on...I know this".
It's just that it would normally take about 25 minutes to finally dredge it from the old memory bank.
But sometimes it jumps out and you feel smug and smirky because the contestant looks bewildered.
Then the next question..."oh I should know this"...but you don't.
So it's rather a treat learning something new every day.
Or every third or fourth day maybe because you don't want to overdo things.
Four days ago I learned something new, and the subject delighted me because it was a very rare case of the earth volcanically stepping up to help itself in the face of damage inflicted upon it by its human inhabitants.
And yes indeedy, we've caused some damage alright.
The planet needs lots of greenery to breath, or something like that, so losing a big slice of that landscape is not a happy picture.
It's a pity Mother Nature and the earth she manages wasn't able to turn on a week of torrential rain to quell the fires.
However, she has managed to turn on a mighty undersea volcanic eruption out there in the Pacific and when volcanoes erupt they send a lot of stuff out, and the stuff that ends up in the oceans is a crusty and common old rock thing called pumice.
As kids wandering the beaches since beaches emerged to be wandered upon have always discovered, big slabs of pumice are great things to carve.
Here was a soft rock you could easily turn into a face, or anything you liked.
There never seemed to be a shortage of the stuff, which made us wonder where it all came from.
So the day at school when I asked a teacher and was told it came from volcanoes I learned something new.
And they're still at it, those simmering, exploding sea monsters at the bottom of the seas and the recent major event was, as we saw, remarkable.
For it created a huge floating grey landscape across a spread of the ocean near Tonga.
It appears to spread from horizon to horizon and it is picking up passengers in the form of algae and barnacles and snails and worms...and corals.
And these millions of tiny passengers will step off in about a year's time when the pumice island edges close to the Great Barrier Reef, which needs refreshment.
