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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
>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>