Some places are quite anal about entering a transaction exactly as it happened. If he entered it in as $40.00 and you hand him $40.25, there is a possibility he could get in trouble (if his boss is watching) if he does the math in his head.
No, I’m saying there are explanations for this behavior that are much simpler than that the cashier must be a stupid teenager.
Lots wrong about this:
Hardly something I would consider a “waste of time”.
Cars today have sensors and gauges to measure all of that. I repeat, manually checking the oil in 2014 on a newish car is unnecessary.
Except for things like charity bake sales, proms, and other ad-hoc enterprises.
How come an inability to do quick math, on-the-spot, completely blindsided, with (apparently) a judging customer staring at you wondering why you couldn’t just do the math instantly considered a sign of stupidity/shame in this generation?
Some people are bad at math, deal with it.
not all cars have oil level sensors. In fact, I’d say the majority don’t.
it’s still wise to check the level from time to time just to make sure everything’s OK. an oil level sensor isn’t going to tell you that coolant is seeping through a failed head gasket and turning your oil into a muddy emulsion.
I delivered pizza for a year. We got a bag at the beginning of the shift with $20 (small bills and coins) and had to make change, and take out our tips, as we went. I’m sure some places let you order online these days, and pay with a credit card, but I think the drivers are still expected to be able to do the math at the door, too.
I do remember one time the pizza was $13.20 (or so); the guy handed me a twenty and said to just give him a fin. That one took me a second to remember what it meant.
I did deal with it. I got back a five dollar bill and 6 coins instead of a 10 dollar bill and one coin: not the end of the world, but I still think the guy was a moron.
I remember in first grade having to go through making change for at least two weeks as in-class drills. I was terrible at it. I would tend to grab two dimes and a nickel rather than a single quarter and other equivalency problems like that. And I would always second guess myself - if the price was $1.92 and I was given a five, do I need to give them $4.08 or $3.08…or wait, is it $2.08…or maybe $3.07?! Because counting up I would always second guess myself when I reached a dollar mark. I do the same thing when counting weeks on a calendar or ages. I have to start with “no weeks, one week, two week” or “no years old, one year old, two years old” because otherwise I want to start with “one” even though the value for that point is zero.
Oh yes, I was able to do calculus fine. But I have always been slow with change. Now that I haven’t operated a register in 10 years I’m pretty sure I’d be even slower.
All you folks asking, “what are schools teaching them these days?” I dunno, why didn’t you teach them how to do a letter yourself? Didn’t you ever have your kid put a thank you card in the mail? I say that one’s on you.
Can your kids give you change back lickety-split even when the transaction’s been altered on the fly? Is it important enough to personally train them on it? 'Cause nobody else is going to do it. If not, stop complaining. If it is, start training.
I’m sure that our great-great grandparents consider us useless parasites and idiots. After all, we don’t know how to saddle a horse, make candles, bale hay, etc.
I don’t LIKE the fact that so many people are bad with math, but let’s face it–when even flip phones have a calculator, those skills just aren’t nearly as important as they used to be.
And it puts you into a moral quandary when you hand them a tenner for $7.50, they input as $100 and give you 92.50 in change.
Myself, I just cant take it. But I gotta admit, it’s tempting since stupidity need to be punished.
That IS a sticky situation. When I was a bartender, I always took it. Maybe I rationalized it as a way to make them realize that they overdrank.
Some kid at a grocery store, though. I couldn’t do it.
Many cashiers don’t realize this. They think that cash is recorded in the same way as other forms of payment. They aren’t involved in the count-down process later, so they really have no idea.
By the same token, the ability to “do math” is not genetic as such.
This scenario cuts both ways. I work at a shop with a staff of many volunteers, most of them retired (if they ever had careers/jobs at all). The cash register program we use is very simple, in fact, it’s the simplest I’ve ever used, and I have used many. Some of them are simply incapable of making a transaction. Others think they are, but screw up all the time. They frequently put coins and bills into the wrong slots, and apparently some of Friday’s volunteers are convinced that it doesn’t really matter where the money goes! At no time in the last twenty-five years did they learn how to open and close windows on a PC, among other baffling, elementary things. Some can’t use a telephone with multiple lines and a “hold” button.
I wondered if they had never had retail jobs (or something similar, like working in a movie theater) in their youth, and, according to my assistant manager, they did not.
Waaay back when I had part-time jobs that involved making change, I was taught that nefarious people would try to scam you by trying to confuse or distract you while you were counting out change, and therefore once you started the process you should complete it robotically and not modify it in any way.
I spent a year working in a video/pinball arcade where my job was making change all day, and I did experience this a few times. It could be something as simple as a customer asking “What time is it?” while you were counting out the change, or abruptly deciding to change a $10 instead of the $20 they just gave you. I also got very adept at holding the customer’s bill between my fingers as I counted the change so that they wouldn’t say, “Hey, I gave you a ten! This is change for a five!”
That too!
My husband has had to show young adult professional men how to tie a knot (in their ties).
My daughter’s college roommate, who I believe has Asperger’s, recently paid $20 to the gas attendant, to fill up her tank. She didn’t realize that since gas prices had dropped dramatically, she’d actually be due change. Believing that there was no refund available to her because she’d pre-paid, she proceeded to pump the additional $3 worth of gas over the car and onto the cement. Luckily my daughter saw what was happening, and they cleaned up the mess before some hapless cigarette smoker blew himself up.
no problem here. “Business attire” is thankfully becoming an anachronism. neckties are nooses, and the only reason we cling to them is because we feel we’re supposed to.
Based on my experience, it’s sadly not a theory. I have students in Years 1 through to 3 as well as post-grad (US grad students, so MA level in this case) who are astounded that you can do things such as outline, draft, and revise a paper. What wizardry is this?!
It is annoying as fuck to get the ‘draft’ of a 10,000 word senior thesis and it looks as if badgers have run loose on the student’s keyboard in place of a sentient being with functional digits. Also magical where the students of everything from 1000 word essays through to the dreaded 10K extended essays have no idea that they’re already supposed to have a thesis and conclusion when they sit down to write.
It’s annoying to have undergrads who are still chained to the five-paragraph essay form, but there are days when these people look like Nobel prize-winners in literature compared to their peers.
I was taught outlining, how to structure a paragraph, grammar & stuff at school; from what I understand it’s because of things like league tables and such at secondary and college level that the students are taught to-the-exam so that the schools reach particular standards.
That said, my fave whine from a student when he did poorly on an essay due to horrible sentence structure, punctuation, and grammar, ‘You’re stifling my creativity!’
Shine on, you special snowflake.
You keep believing that, my friend. Meanwhile, try to find a replacement “Coolant in Oil Sensor” for your car. Or a “Head Gasket Beginning to Leak” sensor. I’ll wave as I drive by you in the breakdown lane!
To be fair, newer vehicles may come with an oil life sensor, but even then it pays to know what kind - direct measure or algorithmic. Direct measure is the more accurate of the two.
This is almost as bad as saying you don’t have to shoulder check any more because your new car has blind spot indicators, or you don’t need to check behind your vehicle/look back before backing out of your garage because you have backing cameras and sensors. And don’t forget only checking your tire pressure when the light goes on! It’s not like those things don’t fail all the time.
All technology fails. You are the failsafe.