So I’m working late and decide to go to the local supermarket to get some junk food. JoJo’s are seasoned french fries, similar to KFC’s potato wedges. I want a little less than 1/2 a pound. I ask the gentleman behind the counter for 1/2 a pound, on the light side, figuring that I’d get 6-7 ounces instead of 8 ounces. The gentleman suggests that 1/2 a pound is a lot and that I probably don’t want to eat that much. So I say okay and he puts 3 tong fulls of jojos into the bag and I said, “Okay, that looks good.”
So the gentelman goes to weight the bag and it comes up .398 lbs. The gentleman goes, “See, only 1/4 of a pound.”
I thought about correcting the gentleman. Just for a second.
I’ve had a similar thing happen to me. I went to a weight loss clinic, and lost a buncha weight. (Yay, me!) But some of it found me recently (boo!) so I gotta work on that. Any way, the procedure was to weigh in on each visit on a scale that read out in lbs and tenths of a pound. If I had lost 2.4 lbs this week, say, one of the people there would always congratulate me on losing 2 lbs and 4 ounces. I didn’t have the heart to correct her.
A few years ago a drunk driver rear ended my dad’s parked car. I was telling someone else about it and for the life of me couldn’t convince her that .24 is not “almost double the legal limit”. No matter how many times I explained it. I finally just said “Yeah, I’m probably just doing the math wrong in my head” and walked away.
(FTR, in Wisconsin the legal limit is .08, even if we were still at the old limit of .10, .24 still wouldn’t be almost double)
That’s pretty funny. I especially liked the “…heard the death knell of reason itself, the anguished cries of dying maths, and the wailing of logicians…”
I heard that exact sound.
Your story reminded me of the Monty Python Holy Grail, “You stay here and guard my son” skit.
I had a supervisor that had the tendency to not follow along very well to what was being explained to him. He recognized that he did it a lot, and once the light lit up for him, he’d joke about it with that skit. “Where are you going?” “Oh, I’m going with you!”
Originally I asked for .33 pounds on her two place decimal scale that read pounds. It was too hard for her. That’s when I said one third pound. The lady was dumber than a doorknob. I asked a couple other employees and they didn’t have a problem. I never did see that lady again.
We don’t deal with ounces on the scales. They’re all decimal so we don’t need metric.
The whole “pounds of jojos” thing drives me nuts anyway. I don’t know how “much” a 1/4, or 1/3, or 1/5 a pound of jojos actually is, you know, what it looks like, so to speak.
Can I just get a french fry sized bag please? Whatever happened to s/m/l? Jeez.
