At a drive-in window of a fast food place my order came to $4.19. I gave the girl $10, and she handed me my change - $5.18 and said, "Your change is $5.81." Dyslexia? The kind that reverses numbers and letters? I handed the change back to her and said that it wasn't correct. She looked puzzled and just stood there until a woman who seemed to be training her told her she needed two more quarters. I took it, looked at it, and handed that back to her and said, "This is 68 cents. I need 81 cents." That really flummoxed her. By then a boy had joined them as they stared at the coins. I said, "You use a calculator too much" and was determined not to tell them to give me 3 quarters, a nickel, and a penny. The woman finally figured it out, gave me the correct change, and I thanked them.
I told you people were getting dumber!
November 2024 Reads for the Rest of Us
3 hours ago
11 comments:
Math-Freeze!!!! I so know this!
All my life.
When I taught my math lesson to my grad school class I had one of the math wiz guys stand beside me to check my math as I went along. I had, hands down, the most creative and innovative lesson, the prof was beside himself, I got the top marks.
Kind of like being able to write and not spell.
Luckily the Ponder children inherited The Engineer's Math Gene.
That's what we get for letting The Machines think for us.
Like Bob said, we are letting too many computers and people do our thinking for us these days.
I've had the math freeze thing happen to me, too. My brain just doesn't want to process something once in a while, and it makes me feel like an idiot.
As we move more and more to a cashless society, this will become more common.
So maybe I should have told her the second time what change to give me. I saw this with students so often when they used a calculator for everything and still got it wrong way too often.
Our OM/DI team ran the snack stand at basketball games from time to time. I had kids who refused to do change. They would bring it to me or one of the other kids. They just got to flummoxed in front of another person.
I'm sure this is why there are several successful cons out there involving confusing the cashier and change.
I'm terrible at math. My brain just doesn't wrap around numbers....
I can live with that about myself!
In a McDonalds (yes, I feel the need to punish myself sometimes) I once order half a dozen chicken nuggets. No, they only came in 6, 9 or 12 portions. I paid the $4.23 with a $10 bill and a quarter. Neither the server nor the Manager could work out the change. I gave them my 100 Watt smile, but inside, I was seething! Whatever happened to edukashun?
This is so unbelievable but such a common expeience. We hve to be alert all the time to protect our hard earned cash from ignorance the same as we have to protect our values from ignorance.
Jay Leno is obviously going to use his man on the street routine to show us more horrors of college grads who can't answer simple questions after going all the way through collge. I mean they can identify cartoons but not a single President on Rushmore or know any of the words to the National anthem- not that I'm all that patriotic, but they don't know shit, can't make change, and can only pass over their credit card for what they want with probably no intention of keeping track of their debt. Y'know what I mean.
Also, I remember one of the first things I learned was count back. Someone gave me a dollar and I knew to start with the cost and count back to a dollar.
.24 and a penny makes 25, a quarter .50, another.75,and another 1.00. Y'know like you did in your head.
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