It was two Thanksgivings ago. I decided to use my discount certificate at the local grocery store knocking off a dollar a pound on a turkey. When the discount did not show on my register tape in the self-checkout line, the 13½ pound turkey and I paid a visit to the service counter.
“What seems to be the problem sir?” the college-age young lady asked cheerfully. Her smile was impossible not to return in kind.
“Maybe I missed something, but I bought this turkey and thought a certificate discounted a buck off each pound.”
“Oh wow – that has happened a few times already with other customers. I apologize – but I can fix it,” she said confidently.
So I figured quickly that at 13.54 pounds, a dollar a pound off would mean a credit of $13.54. Easy peasy – right?
Not so quick. She pulled out her calculator. I bit my tongue. I knew that after a few quick keystrokes, she’d get $13.54 and that would be that.
But no.
Her fingers danced all over the keys. She grabbed my register receipt, then tapped in a few more numbers. I started getting lost in her math. I thought I saw a square root calculation. An absolute value. Pi. The factorial of a right triangle’s hypotenuse rounded to the nearest integer. Thrust vectors required to send this turkey into low earth orbit.
“Darn!” she exclaimed, eyebrows furrowed as if she was taking an Algebra final. “I forgot to add something. I apologize but I need to rerun these numbers.”
“Okay,” I said blankly, completely lost in the higher math she was practicing.
Her fingers attacked the calculator again. I tried following more closely. Wait – did she just take the cosine of an angle? I think I saw her use the exponent function. It was no use. I could not follow any of it. The seconds felt like minutes. Time slowed to a crawl. My brain fogged over in resignation. I regretted having ever asked for the discount. Then suddenly the fingers stopped. She looked at the calculator with a self-congratulatory smile, then looked up at me, still smiling.
“You get thirteen dollars and fifty-five cents!” she cheerfully announced.
I smiled back. I didn’t argue the extra penny that was in my favor. I simply wrote it off as a remnant of interstellar dust from wherever her equations traveled. I dared not suggest the math could have been easier. After all, why? We both got what we needed. I walked out with some extra change in my pocket. And she was beaming with satisfaction, having performed a mathematical proof that would make the eyes of an astrophysicist glaze over.
There actually is a moral to this story. Perhaps disarmed by her smile, I did not get angry or frustrated. Instead, I fully engaged in a wonderfully odd adventure. Approaching the service desk that day, I thought it was all about the turkey. But looking back, I don’t remember the turkey at all. I only remember this quirky moment.
As Thanksgiving looms large this week – and opens the door to Christmas shopping season immediately afterward, don’t forget to enjoy the journey. The little things that happen to us on the way to the bigger things just might be the bigger things we remember.
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