----- Mensaje original -----
Enviado: Viernes 13 de Julio de 2001
12:02
Asunto: 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
>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>