If you know me well, you might know that sometimes I can be a little OCD. Especially when it comes to food. For example, at each of our favourite restaurants, I have a favourite dish that I pretty much order each time we visit. If I said I was feeling like Singapore Laksa or Prawn Pad Thai or Udon Noodle Soup for dinner, Andrew would know where we were eating. (NyoNya, Thai takeaway or Feng Sushi.)

I also get stuck on chocolate bars. Sometimes in the afternoons, I like to award myself a little treat. It helps me get through three o'clock syndrome (why is 3pm such a struggle?). When I started my new contract, I was going through a smarties phase. I like the chocolate in smarties better than M&Ms and they seem to last longer than a chocolate bar. In the UK, the orange smarties are jaffa flavoured and are a bit of a treat. I would always save them to eat last. After eating a few packets of smarties, I noticed that there always seemed to be less orange smarties than the other colours. I wondered if this was actually the case. Were there always less orange smarties? I decided I should find out.

So, for 30 days, I counted the colours in my smarties packets. I recorded the information in a spreadsheet. Never one to do things by halves, I also created a graph.




oooooer, pretty colours...

The results? Well the results are inconclusive. In the beginning I was averaging around 2 orange smarties per packet. Then I swapped to a different batch and suddenly I was averaging 5 orange smarties per packet. At the end, and another batch, I was back down to 2 orange smarties. Maybe it depends on how the orange smartie machine is feeling on the day of distribution. (I'd do another 30 days of data collection but I'm beginning to feel a bit meh about smarties.) In the beginning, my theory was orange smarties cost more to make because of the flavouring. I wonder if that's true.

Each day I've been declaring my orange smartie count on Twitter and the Twitter community have also become interested in the project. (They probably just think I'm a bit of a nerd.) One friend, who is a primary school teacher, even got his kids to do the same experiment. I'm waiting to hear his results.

Some smarties trivia:

• Purple is the colour that appeared most frequently with an average of 5 per pack.
  
  
• The most of any one colour in a pack was 11 purple smarties. I also got 10 yellow smarties in one pack on two occassions.
  
  
• After orange (average of 3 a pack), blue is the colour that appears least frequently.
  
  
• I had two packs that had no (zero!) orange smarties. Pink was the only other colour that failed to appear in a pack.
  
  
• The averages were: orange 2.9, blue 3.6, pink 4.1, purple 5.0, yellow 4.4, green 4.7, brown 3.9, red 4.0.