The Buckets by Greg Cravens for February 10, 2013

Ah – I miss the days of using a slide rule, when you had to know how math worked and were just verifying the answers.

No, then you’ll need a sharpened pencil and a good writing place to keep from becoming another cyber-zombie.

I’m 60 years old and I have yet to use algebra in the real world.

Years ago my daughter was working in the mall and the power went out – she was the only one who could figure how to do a bill by hand!

I was in a grocery store once and purchased about $19.47 worth of stuff. I gave the cashier a $100 bill. She accidentally keyed it as $1000. The problem was that she had no idea how to count out the change (by counting up). She called the manager, and he had to go back to the office to use his ten-key-calculator to figure out my change.

Gator007, Sheri Summ. Oviously you are not Engineers. Used it daily for many years.

I feel for you, Toby.

Maths was and still is my worst enemy.

xxx

Whatever you say Toby.

In math, all I know is that 2 and 2 is 22. Am I wrong??

I use simple math everyday, without a caluclator. How else am I to know if the total at the cashier is correct? (sometimes, I get within a few cents when some of the items are taxed at 12% – which tickles me no end!) And I find it really Really REALLY annoying that cashiers do not count out the change. .Poor Toby. Destinied to be short changed. How IS he going to make his millions?

OK, say you can kill a zombie with one sharpened stick and it takes 10 minutes to make a stick sharp enough to kill a zombie and zombies are attacking your compound at the rate of 11 per hour and you started out with 31 sticks, then how many minutes until you are overrun by zombies as zombies approach infinity?