The "If Only I Had Studied Harder In School!" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Just got my monthly statement from The Pennsylvania School Employees' Retirement System (PSERS) telling me about all the medical services they paid for me during the past month.  I have been part of PSERS since I began teaching in 1966 and have found the organization to be fantastic.  Since retirement in 1999 I do pay a monthly premium, which is deducted from my teacher's pension, but the amount I pay would in no way come close to what PSERS has paid for my medical bills since I retired.  After four back surgeries, prostate cancer, a few colon screenings and multiple skin cancer surgeries, I would be living in the poor house had it not been for my friends at PSERS.  I also pay an addition charge for drugs, but luckily haven't had to use that feature as much as the medical feature.  Today when I got the monthly statement I actually read just about every word in the 10 page summary.  The reason I didn't read everything is because I couldn't read it.  At the top of the last page it read:   ATTENTION: Free Language Assistance.  What followed was a chart that displayed, in various languages, the phone number to call for free language assistance services for individuals with limited English proficiency.  And...it wasn't just a few languages as you can see by the following chart.  It featured 19 languages and that list didn't even include English. So, I decided to "Google" How many languages are there in the world.  I was shocked!  Do you know that there are 7,111 languages which are spoken today.  That number is constantly in flux, because we're learning more about the world's languages every day.  And, beyond that, the languages themselves are in flux. They're living and dynamic, spoken by communities whose lives are shaped by our rapidly changing world.  Makes me only realize how much of a bubble I must be living in, since I can only speak and read one language.  Yeah, I took two years of Latin and two years of French, but since I never used either one, I have forgotten most of what I learned.  Same goes for everything.  I took typing in high school and up until about 10 years ago, I had to "hunt & peck" when I typed.  Today I'll bet I could type close to 70 words a minute being that I have been writing a story each day for the past 10 or so years for my blog.  And, that's without having to look at the keys when typing.  Anyway, check out the chart below and you can see the page that I get every month as part of my mailing from PSERS.  How many languages do you recognize?  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.

Click on chart to enlarge it.