My wife and I used to drive our kids INSANE w/ this. We’d be driving someplace, and the kids would ask where the place was, and we’d say, “Over thataways a bit. We’ll find it.” 
That’s how I got to be in my twenties before I learned to drive. (Around here, not being a driver would be quite a handicap). Congratulations on your progress towards becoming a swimmer!
That happened to me. The cashier said I gave her too much and gave back the two pennies. Then, she gave me 3 more pennies as change.
I don’t want to speak for monstro but when I read her post I immediately assumed she was talking about those wretched commercials with the family of bears whose son can’t figure out how not to leave skid marks on his drawers. Every time I see it or the like, it amazes me that a whole advertising campaign has been built around the concept that there is a real ass wiping crisis in the nation :smack:
I’m quite confident that’s NOT what’s happening in those commercials.
The ads are for Charmin, and they are touting the fact that it is soft but will not leave pieces of TP behind on your behind, a claim I’ve personally found to be completely false. Unless there’s some new spot I’ve not seen.
A quick googling of the term “My husband leaves skid marks on…” reveals that there are apparently a whole lot of men who are guilty of chronically leaving poo marks on their underwear, towels, bedsheets, etc… :smack::eek:
The inability to do basic math. I can understand when someone can’t do a cube root in their head, but there are people who couldn’t tell you how many minutes are in three hours, or how old someone born in 1980 is.
Given that it was a flight from Houston to Tokyo, maybe the printed arrival time WAS four hours later than the departure time, and the person was simply unaware of time zones?
That wasn’t the impression I got from him. He seemed to think that because every flight he’d been on was a short one, that this would also be a short one. He was also one of those the-world-revolves-around-America Americans, so maybe that was a factor in it.
Believe it or not, I can kind of see his logic.
Suppose he’s on a flight that leaves Houston on Thursday, Oct 24 at 2PM local time. The time in Tokyo at that same time is Friday, Oct 25 4AM.
A direct flight from Houston to Tokyo is 14 hours and 5 minutes which means he’ll arrive in Tokyo at local time 6PM.
So if he just gave a cursory look at his ticket he’d see a departure of 2PM and arrival 6PM - so 4 hours! Let’s just hope he’s not trying to make a Friday morning meeting in Tokyo because he’s going to be a bit late…
Oops - see Fretful Porcupine and Velocity already addressed this… Well, he’ll be super surprised on the return trip!
Sure, but even then I would expect someone to notice that Houston and Tokyo are a vast ways apart on the map and that you’d need a very long time to fly that distance, much more than from Houston to Seattle.
Another one for mental math. Calculating a 20% tip in your head should be trivial. Decimal slide and double.
I’ve also experienced cashiers with a complete inability to cope with being handed odd amounts of change.
You are of course correct, the first time I flew to Asia I knew I was in for a loooonnnggg flight, but I was still bemused by what the International Date Line did for my arrival times.
Maybe there’s some ignorance of the distances involved, but I suspect it’s mixed in with some ignorance of how fast jets can fly. That is, he might have some sense that Tokyo is really far away, but he believes jets can fly really, really fast, and that they can cover that distance in four hours or so. In reality, of course, that would require supersonic speeds, and I’m fairly certain Concorde couldn’t even do it that fast.
Same with me and my wife but reversed. I don’t know how much of this was a childhood fascination with maps and an interest in being able to relate the 2d map to the 3d world. I suspect that it is something everyone could do, but it just isn’t something they practice.
Swimming again.
Big thing here is some people in a group wont tell others they can swim or else try something like canoeing where if you cant swim it could be dangerous.
If he leaves from Tokyo at 8AM on the return trip he’ll get back to Houston before he leaves.
An old joke talks about flying east over one time zone leaving at 9AM and arriving several hundred miles away at 9:10AM. “I sure want to see that plane take off!”
Then I’m ying to your yang.
I can’t remember what year things happened. Even important things like vacations, marriages and even deaths. I mean I’m BAD. Even for stuff that has happened fairly recently.
Yes, and there are all kinds of tricks one can employ if one “gets” math.
- To multiply by 5, take half and move the decimal to the right.
- To calculate 15%, take 10% by moving the decimal, then half of that added back onto the 10%.
- To multiply by 4, double the number and then double that number.
- For pounds to kilograms it’s approximately a multiplication of 2.2. So, double the number, then move the decimal to the left and add that number back onto the X2 number.
Etc, etc…
And it’s so easy to estimate things using the decimal trick too. Like multiplying by say, 36 is a little more than a third (.33) with the decimal moved twice, etc.
Easy peasy.