One the mental front he has just been to Pizza Express and for the second week running has had to explain some basic mental arithmetic to the waitress to help her with the bill. What worries him is that usually he is tended by a Portugese or Czech waitress and everything goes without commenty. For the last two weeks he has been served by English waitresses who clearly cannot do the most basic arithmetic processes even when supplied with a calculator. But hey... we are told that education is not declining so it must be GF's imagination.
One the pedestrian front GF suffers, like his Grandfather before him, with his feet. As a result, he finds it hard to find comfortable shoes - but once found he wears them into the ground (which, thinking about it, is what shoes are for). He has noticed that he might have overdone it this time. On investigation earlier this evening he realised that the stitiching on the leather uppers had disintegrated and his shoes were (quite literally) falling apart.
2 comments:
Fear not - we are assured by our emminently qualified Education Secretary, that our childrens education is in the very best of hands. The same one's no doubt that have told us that spelling is irrelkevant, grammar is optional and arithmetic is incidental. The only thing about our education system that is comprehensive is its failure to educate anyone.
I have groiwn tired of correcting those who think that the singular of "premises" is a "premise". I simply hand out copies of the page from the OED.
This is why I generally prefer to put up with a pocketful of "shrapnel" rather than always trying to assist the shop assistant to minimize the number of coins in the change. If the bill comes to £3.04, say, and, not having the exact odd fourpence, you tender £5.10, it can completely panic many of the products of our fine educational system, even though modern tills are set up to calculate the change for them. Cruelly offer the odd change after they have keyed in the amounts and you trigger a nervous breakdown.
When I was a teenager back in the middle ages, I spent some time working behind a counter, using those old fashioned Gross mechanical tills (usually grey in colour) where you added up the total price in your head and then keyed it in by "chording" the available values on the till keys to build up the total. You calculated change by counting up from the price to the amount tendered. If the customer tendered the odd change as in my example, a bit more mental agility was required but it was not exactly rocket science.
Motivation is a factor. My generation learnt to do quick mental arithmetic because we had no choice. The equivalent of the sort of calculator which is now given away would cost several hundred pounds and fill half a desk. But I bet some of these dozy beggars who can't add up simple bills can calculate the outcome of a three-way double zonker accumulator bet down the local bookie's in the twinkling of an eye.
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