The Tyranny of Math

Quick, what is two thirds in decimals?   I'll tell you what it is; it is exactly three turkey sandwiches on standard size sandwich bread.  Don't know what I am talking about?  Think about it.  How many times have you bought three quarters of a pound of lunch meat and on Thursday your kid gets a goyish style (a topic for another day) bologna on white because you ran out of Hebrew National? Or more commonly, after making your planned number of sandwiches you end up with just one or two slices of olive loaf at the end. What do you do with those?  Put them on a Ritz and serve it as an appetizer?  Another goyish idea, no doubt.

Why does this happen?  Because you order one half of one pound, or three quarters of one pound or even one pound exactly.  And all this without even the vaguest notion of how much meat you are actually putting on each sandwich.  But that, of course is only the proximate cause of your cold cut  miscalculation.  What is the ultimate cause?  When you say to the lunch meat slicing serf at the Acme (or Waldbaums, for our North Jersey readers) "I'll have two thirds of a pound of the honey baked ham (sweet meat, yet another goyish concept) she looks up from her cell phone and with that vacant, I'm not really here, stare, asks "Is that more or less than one half pound??"
And because you are already stressed from the lady who rolled her cart up to the deli counter after you, and ordered seventeen different meat, cheese, and prepared salad selections before you have a chance to say, "I'm next", you buckle and say "just give me three quarters of a pound".  And thus the math deficient among us have won. So you dejectedly push your cart toward the Milano cookies which, you are quite certain, will make you feel better about the future of America when all of our doctors and engineers are Chinese.


But why can't the clerk just weigh out two thirds of a pound on the scale?  Because the scale is digital and it only measures in tenth of a pound increments.  So the meat slicers union has convinced the Department of Labor to implement a regulation stating that Acme can only force its employees to memorize three fraction to decimal equivalents; 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 of a pound.  So there you have it Johnny.  That is why you must  take algebra and geometry because you really do use it every single day whether you know it or not.