I’ve been seeing 222 and 2222 for years, but I don’t think anything of it.  I really think it’s just a phenomenon caused by

(1.) always noticing it (after all, if you’re at this website, you’re probably in the top 1% of people in the world at noticing numbers as substrings.), and

(2.) seeing lots of numbers in every day life.

I mentioned this to my sister at some point, and she started seeing 222 too.  I suspect many of us got started on this by seeing the 222 a few times in short succession (or perhaps the time 22:22), and then kept noticing it thereafter.

Regarding the second point:

I’d think that we see hundreds of random-ish three digit numbers every day.  Every thousand of these will be a 222.

Think about it – each 7 digit phone number is 5 chances to see a three digit string.  There are tons of miscellaneous random-ish numbers scattered about everyday life, including bar code numbers, credit card numbers, house numbers, zip codes, license plate numbers, etc…

Plus, tons of numbers are skewed towards smaller digits.  For example, room numbers are much more likely to be 222 than other 3-digit numbers.  The time is much more likely to be 2:22 or 12:22 than 9:99.  Days for dates only go up to 31.  Prices (menus, receipts, etc) probably also are skewed towards smaller digits.

Given all this, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if we saw variants of the number 222 or 2,222 once or twice a day.

By the way, my word count for this post just now was 222.   =D.   (Oh, and word count is clearly the sort of distribution that would be skewed towards smaller digits, too)

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