Slapping a D notice on a thread.

On the subject of maths....

Many years ago we went to the Tatton Park Agricultural Show.
They always have stalls inside one of the buildings and a young woman was selling crockery.
We saw she had some nice straight-sided thin-walled china coffee cups and saucers.
The cups were £2.50 each and the saucers £1.50. Usually if you buy a boxed set, say in John Lewis, sets come in a pack of four. It's annoying if you then at some time or other break one. So we decided on five sets.
I asked the woman for five cups and five saucers.
I took two ten-pound notes out of my wallet and offered them to her.

But she got her calculator out to work out the price!

 

When somebody got their phone out to work out the difference between 2 prices (eaçh after discount) for an exchange, I said loudly "are you going to phone a friend for the answer?" to the amusement of others in the queue.

 

It's the same when your at a cashier and you offer the odd 35p for a £5.35 order when you give them a £10.

BJ.

 

It's the reliance on calculators that kids have had since their school days.

In my teens working in an office we occasionally used Odhner calculators which would add up and subtract in Stirling. They weighed about 30lb and were about as big as a microwave.

In my thirties my firm bought me a "pocket calculator" the size of a house brick which would add, subtract multiply and divide but had no memory and cost £100.
Ten years later, garages were giving away multi-functional calculators with a tank-full of petrol.

I remember once walking into an office at work where I'd asked one of the clerks for some figures. She said she had them and produced a piece of paper with a column of a dozen single and two digit figures.
I was standing in front of her desk.
I asked her for the total. She reached for a calculator and before she'd finished added them up, I'd already added them up in my head and I was reading them upside down.

That really confuses them!

 

My father was an Accounts clerk for a large Cash and Carry company. One day the computer went down and they had to do all the money work the old way. At the end after checking everything they were a certain amount out. Took them ages to work out that my Father had added in a telephone number which some one had called out while he was doing the figures.

 

Another (valid) answer is 2+2=11

 

Radix 3

 

Mike Allen
What can one say ,cept if the cap fits ,wear it.

 

Sorry posted too soon
should have been
If the cap fits wear it if not stop trying it for size don't start stretching !

my grandma's favourite saying which I think can be applied in this situation

 

Interesting.

 

Fun thread
I agree though that folk are often too ready to turn to their calculators, computers, etc., even when the answer is so simple and obvious.