# A meter cupboard's numbers are counting people, not power > Five handwritten meter readings inside a cupboard door turn out, worked as arithmetic, to track how many people actually live in the house. August 19, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/numbers-inside-the-meter-cupboard Five rows of chalk-white handwriting on a slate ground. Two columns, nothing else: a date, then a number. 12.03.09 41207. 06.11.11 48930. 19.07.14 55102. 02.02.18 61884. 30.09.22 68450. One hand wrote every line. Nobody sat down to keep this. It's a meter reading, jotted on a cupboard door each time somebody happened to check — and it's turned out to be the most honest record the house has of itself. ## Why print numbers scrawled inside a cupboard? Because they're the one thing in the house nobody wrote for an audience. A photograph gets posed and a letter gets drafted, but a meter reading gets written for whoever checks the meter next, in the two seconds it takes to jot it down. That's what makes it trustworthy in a way almost nothing else on a wall is — nobody was managing an impression when they wrote 61884 on a cupboard door. ## Why do the date and the reading have to rise together? Because a number on its own is just a count, and a date on its own is just proof somebody opened the cupboard that day — paired, the two columns turn into a rate. Subtract one reading from the next and divide by the time between them, and each gap between visits becomes a figure for how much the house used per year in that stretch. Worked through this way, the rate falls every time: roughly 2,910 units a year in the earliest stretch, then about 2,290, then around 1,920, then near 1,410 in the most recent gap — and the gap between readings itself keeps opening wider each time somebody checks. The record doesn't say why. A house uses less power for plenty of reasons, and whoever's reading a print like this already knows which one is theirs. ### The columns as a shape, not a spreadsheet Two straight columns, one hand, a falling rate nobody had to calculate to notice — the reading itself, printed at roughly the size these five rows were originally written, carries the same weight [a mile marker counting distance already covered](/stories/milestone-and-mileage) carries on a road. ## What makes a good version of this print? Keeping the handwriting uneven and the gaps between rows honest, rather than laying the five readings out in a tidy, evenly spaced table. The real record wasn't written on a schedule — somebody happened to check, sometimes not long after the last time, sometimes after a much longer stretch. Straightening that into equal spacing turns a record into a chart, which is a different and less interesting object. [A design that's really just digits, arranged well](/stories/numbers-as-a-design), depends entirely on getting that irregularity right. ## Why does nobody choose to keep a record like this? Because it isn't a record anyone decided to start — it's a habit that happened to leave a trace on a surface nothing else ever gets tidied off. A cupboard door with a meter behind it is the one wall in most houses that nobody paints over, frames, or photographs, so anything written there survives by neglect rather than by care. That's also why it stretches over more than a decade in one hand: the surface never got wiped clean for being untidy, the way almost anywhere else in the house eventually would. ## Does this still work if the meter is digital now? For an existing cupboard door, yes — the readings already exist and this reproduces what somebody already wrote there. A newer meter that reports its own numbers electronically won't grow a written record like this one from scratch, because there's nothing left for a hand to do. What this print asks for isn't a current reading, it's whatever handwriting is already on that door from before the meter changed, if the house is old enough to carry both eras on the same wall. ## Does it print well? Yes — flat chalk-white handwriting on a plain dark ground is close to how it actually looks, so almost no translation is needed. Two simple columns keep [the whole print sitting inside one clean block at chest height](/stories/composition-for-a-chest-print) rather than spreading thin across the shirt, and one ink is enough — the handwriting itself supplies all the texture the design needs. ## How do I get one made? Describe the readings at [JustOG](/) — the dates, the numbers, and whose hand wrote them. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped. Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop). Five dates, five numbers, and a rate that only the arithmetic gives away.