Order Creating Order Creating Order Creating Order

I got a sneak peek inside a very special office.

Have you ever seen the people in uniform late at night holding oversized TNG triquarters?
These people are counters.  They take inventory of a ridiculous number of items.  These posters are for training purposes.

An experienced counter can look at a shelf, or at a picture of a shell apparently, and count the repetitive lines, shapes and patterns.



Counters learn a certain way of seeing.
Where the painter looks at areas of light and dark, the counter looks at the way that shapes make patterns.  I raced a friend while at a Wegmans, counting a section of one aisle.  Erin is a counter, or rather, was a counter.  She was fast, and accurate.  I was not nearly as quick as her.   Something is clearly happening differently after a person practices counting large groups of items.  



Now without scrolling up, how many people are in the first picture? How many were black, how many were Asian, how many were Hispanic, how many were white?