kitchen table math, the sequel: Be afraid

Friday, August 15, 2008

Be afraid

I had lunch yesterday with an accountant who insisted on picking up the tab. When the waiter brought the check, the accountant pulled out his calculator.

To calculate the tip.
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9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Precisely because he's an accountant, and is used to calculating things "to the penny". I had to look it up, but that's the ISTJ Myers-Briggs type.
http://www.geocities.com/lifexplore/mbcareer.htm

I used to be more ISTJ-y, but I have drifted more INTJ-y, sometimes INTP-y. Always I (100%), always T, usually J, and flip-floppy on the S/N axis.

Translation: as a child I used to mentally calculate the sales tax to the penny. As a middle-aged adult, I estimate the tax-and-tip by dividing by 4 or estimate the tip by dividing by 6, and then round up to the nearest convenient whatever. But I never pull out a calculator at the table.

August 15, 2008 at 8:35 AM
Independent George said...

That's your trouble right there.

Never dine with accountants. They''re even worse than engineers when it comes to splitting the tab.

August 15, 2008 at 9:16 AM
Catherine Johnson said...

yikes!

August 15, 2008 at 10:19 AM
Catherine Johnson said...

true confessions: I've had some major check-splitting scenes in my day - once a whole table of us got into a memory fog over whether somebody had or had not already put down a twenty....

August 15, 2008 at 10:20 AM
Catherine Johnson said...

oh heck - down to the wire as usual - we have to leave for the airport THIS SECOND - back in a week!

August 15, 2008 at 11:00 AM
TerriW said...

A couple of weekends ago, I went to a local garage sale and the kid manning the booth had his EM math journal sitting right on the table next to him ... and couldn't give me change from a 10 for a 6.50 purchase.

Maybe he could write about how that transaction made him feel.

August 15, 2008 at 4:44 PM
ChrisA said...

hey, hey, hey, be nice to engineers!

I have been with a few that are very uptight about the bill, but most are flexible and gracious with the tip, and they don't pull out their calculators!

August 17, 2008 at 6:51 PM
Tracy W said...

When I was hunting for jobs at the end of university the graduate recruitment schemes typically included an arithemtic test with no calculators. I shortly realised that during my engineering degree my mental arithemtic skills had atrophied under the weight of pages and pages of maths where the largest actual number I deal with was typically 3, and that was just referring to an equation.

I would up downloading one of those cheap computer games where mathematical equations scroll down the screen and you have to enter the answer before it hits the bottom and bombs your city, in order to bring my mental arithmetic skills back up to snuff.

August 18, 2008 at 3:36 AM
Tex said...

The winner on last night’s Teen Jeopardy was unable to give the correct answer to a question that asked how much a dress would cost if it was marked 20% off the original price of $80.

Seemed a shame, since she appeared to be such a well-educated teenager.

EVEN WORSE . . . when I asked my teenage son the same question he took about 10 seconds or more to derive the answer. He approached this problem by dividing 80 by 5, and then subtracting the answer from 80.

Interestingly, while he was slow in calculating, I think his response demonstrated “understanding of the concept”. Is this what reformers want?

August 22, 2008 at 1:15 PM

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