15 Years To Count to a Million...

It's official, Les Stewart has done something very bizarre.In fact, he has done something so strange that nine years after the Mudjimba resident finished doing it, he is still getting notoriety. A website which tracks odd happenings around the world, Oddee, has listed Les’ entry in the Guinness Book of World Records, as the third most bizarre world record of all time.He spent 15 years, from 1983 to 1998, typing out all of the numbers from one to one million (in letters not numerals), simply because he “wanted something to do.” And as far as Les is concerned, his recent recognition on the Oddee website could be his ticket to the big time. “This is going to go all around the world,” he said.“The (latest) Guinness Book of World Records will come out in the next month or two, so there’s going to be enormous publicity.” But why on earth would anyone want to do what he’s done? “It just came naturally to me,” he said.“I got the record in 1983 for typing one to one million in numerals, but I kept on typing for 15 years after that.” He typed for 20 minutes, “every waking hour”, on the hour until the mammoth task he had set himself was done. But perhaps more bizarre than his world record achievement, is the fact that Les threw out all but two of the 19,890 pages he typed over those fifteen years.“I just put them in the recycling bin, we’ve got too many things in the house,” he said. “But I kept the first and the last page.” Les was also named in the Guinness Book of World Records for putting the most number of stamps on a single envelope, three thousand- four hundred, to be exact.He said he would like to continue attempting world records, but said the judging regime had become much stricter than it had been in the past. “Any athlete will tell you, they’re getting harder every year,” he said.But as Les said, he had probably already done his bit for the Guinness Book of World Records. “I got my first world record in 1983 for typing, which is nearly 25 years ago, and not many Australians have done that,” he said.“I’m a bit of a one of a kind.”