CHS had three small lottery wins, I'd been carrying the winning tickets around for a few weeks but today I remembered to cash them in.
One was for £5.50, one £5 and one was for £6.50.
The person on the till was completely unable to work out the total amount that I was owed.
I said that the three tickets came to £17, the assistant disagreed, explaining that as the amounts included 50p the total must also include 50p.
So I shut up and waited whilst the queue behind me got longer and longer.
Eventually the manager came out, cleared the queue and then asked what the problem was.
He also seemed unable to add up the amounts but did at least suggest giving me each of the amount separately, so I finally received my £17.
Whilst I was out CHS received a phone call from one of his brothers, it seems he had done a DNA test after seeing a TV advert. He phoned because he was confused, two of his cousins were showing as his nearest family match. He wondered why CHS was not his nearest match and was quite worried about the implications of this. CHS reassured him, explaining that as CHS has never done a DNA test he wouldn't be on the database to appear as a match!
10 comments:
You do seem to find them! People I meet are boring in comparison.
Never ceases to amaze how reasonably sensible people can have blind spots, especially where math is concerned. I have been guilty of that myself!
What is even funnier is that these were all adults. Thanks for the laugh. Shared with my hubby. Ana in USA
What age were these people? Obviously did not do the maths in their heads as we were taught. I despair.
working in a hospital I am in constant contact with the public...day in and day out people amaze me...coworkers and patients...
I'm often met with CA glare when you offer a note and coin so as not to be given tons of coins as change.
This was obviously a fault of the computer system...could not possibly be that they were in any way dim...perhaps they were saving their brain power for something else...what takeaway to order maybe?! x
I think assistants are only used to computer adding these days - any semblance of mental arithmetic seems to have vanished. When I was at school we had mental arithmetic each morning.
Never ceases to amaze. Wonder who ties her shoe-laces?
We once had a Summer Assistant who come the end of summer was going off to Cambridge to read Classics. He was positively gifted as far as English and Literature were concerned, he read Beowulf in the original Anglo Saxon in his tea breaks, for fun!
However, when he once had to multiply eight by four, he got the calculator out of the drawer. I was gobsmacked, and said "'C', it's thirty two"! He took my word for it (just as well, he was a lovely boy, I'd have hated to have to kill him for ignoring me!) but was atonished that anyone could just come up with the answer 'in their head'!
He said he couldn't believe how brilliant I was at 'maths', so I enlightened him, it's not 'maths, it's 'arithmetic' and there's nothing in any way brilliant about knowing four eights are thirty two! He, however was of that unfortunate cohort who were not taught 'times tables' or indeed any mental arithmetic.
Although I'm some twenty years younger than Pat (Weaver of Grass), my primary and junior schools also did a mental arithmetic test, random times table test and a ten word spelling test every morning.
I'm sure that knowing my multiplication tables has been of a lot more use throughout my life than being able to read Anglo Saxon, Greek
and Roman! Although I did study Latin, which has at times proved useful!
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