Thursday, January 12

Arithmetic


On a bright Sunday morning, the job was to pickup from one of the more upmarket Lake District country house hotels and takes some folks the 100miles to Manchester airport.
The luggage was loaded and my fare turned out to be a German couple and an English guy in his thirties who had been attending a posh wedding at the hotel.
They were all flying back to Tenerife where they were living and working.
They seemed to be a reasonably intelligent and sophisticated group and the ride went quickly and smoothly enough, with the couple chatting and the guy playing with his i-phone.
That is until we reached the airport and its unloading point. Now as the airport is very busy and security is very tight only a few minutes are allowed to unload before you are firmly moved on.
The only thing which needed to be done before we unloaded the luggage was to quickly pay me the £90 owed for the taxi fare.
 They were it turned out splitting the fare between the couple and the single guy and so they each had some notes in their hands.
I could not believe it when the single guy instead of handing over the cash appeared to be concentrating on sending a text on his i-phone.
This went on for a full two minutes and I was getting more and more stressed thinking about the parking fine that I would surely be getting.
But then looking a bit closer at his beloved phone I realised with amazement that he was actually using the calculator function to try and figure out half of £90.
“Forty five” I blurted out a bit too loudly whilst rolling my eyes and shaking my head in exasperation.
Believe it or not, he then actually finished checking this simple sum on his phone for a further thirty seconds before handing over the cash.
Don’t think I have ever come as close to swearing before.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

typical, out of the germans and the english it turns out to be a english guy in his 30's who needs a calculator to figure out half of £90.... i feels so ashamed :)

Dan said...

Tears ago, during my mis-spent youth, I was a bookie's clerk. Now, to be any good in that job, I had to be very quick on mental arithmetic, quicker by far than anyone with a calculator. The same cannot be said of the average British punter.

Put out two similar bookies, one showing 9/2 and one showing 4 1/2 odds on a horse. The one showing 4 1/2 will get more business than the 9/2, despite the odds being the same, because the punters just don't understand fractions.

The worst of the lot, though (and this was in the early 1990s) was an oldish lady who it seemed had not really managed to quite come to terms with modern decimal coinage, and insisted on converting all money back to pounds, shillings and pence then trying to work out her winnings in the old system. Had she been an arithmetic wizard, it might have worked but she turned out to be really rather dim. Much shouting ensued.

bob mullen said...

Dan: It sound like you have a stock of good storys too. Maybe you could do a blog yourself which I think would be interesting. Let me know if you do. Cheers

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Devon Driver said...

I went for a driving assessment at the local bus station not too long ago - they put you through some quick maths and english tests.

Seems I've been overchanging people by £1 on quite a few fares, not realised, and got into the habit of dishing out £x

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