We are ruled and defined by numbers, whether it’s our Social Security number or the countless transaction numbers we are assigned as we go about our daily business.

The older I get, the harder I find it is to deal with them if they are presented as an unbroken string of digits. Take a random example: 483027561471985284. We may be asked to save it, write it down, refer to it or even read it back to someone over the telephone. Even for a young person, that’s almost impossible, much less for an octogenarian whose eyes aren’t what they once were.

I would make it a requirement for everyone — retailers, government employees, website designers, you name it — to split such series of numbers into groups of three or four: 483 027 561 471 985 284. Our Social Security and charge card numbers are already formatted that way, probably because someone discovered that it results in far fewer errors.

This may seem trivial compared to the problems we face over tax reform, gun laws and health care, but I believe it’s a battle worth fighting, one that might even be winnable in 2018.