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Re: GG and CD shop clerks



Oh, it's worse than just store clerks, Bradley ... about 12 years ago we wanted to cash in a certificate of deposit at our bank. It had been rolling over for three years. We sat down at the desk of a (young) bank officer, handed him the passbook, and waited. He looked a bit nervous and unfamiliar with the process, but proceeded to bang away on his desk calculator.
 
He got it wrong. A bank officer. He couldn't compute three years of a fixed rate of interest. Oh, and of course the Direction of Wrong was in the bank's favor, not ours.
 
He got very flustered when we told him. He tried it again. Still wrong, still the wrong direction.
 
Finally he excused himself for about twenty minutes. He'd gone upstairs to the computer department and had someone put the problem to some software in the bank computer. It came back pretty much right this time. He said they'd had to ask the program to compute it three times, one year at a time -- nobody could figure out how to do it directly over the whole three years. It differed by maybe a dollar or two from our computations -- but at least in our direction for a change, we didn't quibble.
 
Don't be so blue. Look at it this way ... soon, if not already, anyone who CAN divide by 4 accurately will be able to pull in U$125,000 a year as a bank vice-president or an insurance company actuary, or someone with the responsibility of preventing airplanes from crashing into one another. (My reading of the nuclear power industry leads me to conclude those people don't need to know how to divide by 4.)
 
These kinds of store clerks -- there's a Yiddish phrase used to describe them: Schtick Fleische mit zwei Augen. If you need help with it -- it's about the same in German -- just ask.
 
Bob
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Bradley P Lehman <bpl@UMICH.EDU>
To: F_MINOR@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU <F_MINOR@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Friday, July 13, 2001 10:31 AM
Subject: GG and CD shop clerks

>Yep.  CD shop clerks who have no concept of good music, or of music
>history (of even the past 25 years of ANY kind of music).  They just sell
>"product."
>
>But I despair even more when I see the inability of CD shop clerks to
>understand sixth-grade arithmetic. They're being paid to do numbers
>accurately, but they have no concept of how numbers work. They have no
>mental sensors to catch it when something is obviously WAY OFF.
>
>Last week at a typical CD shop in a mall I bought three CDs from a sale
>display. The sign said everything with the yellow "SUPER BUY" sticker
>would have 75% discount at the register. A nice sale. The original prices
>of the items were 19.99, 9.99, and 9.99.
 
<snip>