I get hung up on numbers sometimes.
Those little episodes of everyday mathematics they didn't warn you about in
school. Math is hard they say, or mathematics can be fun. Either way, there's a
50/50 chance consciousness of numbers will annoy you.
Like parking meters. Recently I was
using one of those new parking meters that allows one to slide in one's
bankcard to pay the appropriate fee. Absolutely fantastic for those of us who
don't like change rattling around in our pockets.
I noticed the meter had a button
you could push for a free initial 15 minutes. A great courtesy the official
parking folks offer to downtown patrons. Always anxious to take advantage of a
deal, I pressed that button.
I then slid in my card and pressed
the buttons necessary to pay for an additional hour of parking. The
computerized machine displayed a little digital message saying to wait, that my
transaction was being authorized. And I waited. And I waited. Finally the
machine said that the transaction was accepted and then displayed the time I
had on my meter.
It was only one hour and
14
minutes!
They robbed me of a free minute!
For some reason I was really mad. All that effort on my part to be a conscientious
pay for my parking citizen, and the process itself robbed me of a minute.
I'm not sure what was worse;
Contemplating that they robbed me of a minute I paid for in the hour my
bankcard was credited to, or the free minute they so graciously offered and
then yanked away while their pokey contraption practically pick-pocketed my
parking payment.
Not to mention the number of
minutes I wasted being mad over such a tiny travesty. If only I didn't know
math...
America, ya gotta love it.
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