The Curse Of Being An Accountant or Shortchanged #3

The chronic curse of being an accountant is that you remember all sequenced numbers---old phone numbers, license plates, house numbers, ID numbers...sometimes you don't remember what or who the numbers belong to or why they're important. But they all stay with you. I once had occasion to call someone who I hadn't spoken with in at least forty years, and the only way I could get past his secretary and prove my legitimacy was to run his old phone number for him.

A more specific curse comes at the end of dinner out with friends, after cocktails and several bottles of wine, when the bill comes and it has to be divided three or four ways, and they always look to me for a dollar amount, and I'm three sheets to the wind. But hey, I'm the accountant.

Yesterday I went into the retail section of one of my favorite restaurants to buy some food for dinner. I ordered a piece of chicken al mattone, rigatoni primavera, a loaf of bread, cookies...OK, remember this is New York---the bill came to almost 50 bucks (it did suffice for two meals for She and I). The chicken and the pasta are taxable here, the bread and cookies not...trust me, I know it's arcane, but that's sales tax in the Big Apple, and the bread was $7 and the cookies $12 (remember, it's New York). My point is that I was charged too much.

And once again, I should have said something and did not.

Shortchanged #2

Back in the day, when dinosaurs did indeed roam the earth, if you worked as a cashier in a retail location of any sort, you needed to know how to make change...cash registers didn't yet have the option of punching in the amount tendered. Whether it was a grocery store, gas station, coffee shop, you needed to be able to ring up the sale and mentally do the arithmetic to make change if necessary.

All this changed many years ago, when McDonald's became one of the first chains to put in cash registers that had the +/- feature that enabled salespeople to just hit the button and calculate the change, thereby insuring that neither the store nor the customer was shortchanged.

I have a few clients that pay me in cash rather than by check, and so sometimes I'll make purchases using actual greenbacks. Twice in the last few weeks I've received less change that I was supposed to get, coincidentally each time from a butcher, different stores each time. Each time it was a difference in coins, receiving 25 cents instead of 75 cents, or something like that. The amounts aren't large, but I'm wondering if, each time, it was a conscious mistake, just carelessness, or something else.

And each time I said nothing...I wonder what that says about me in these situations.

Shortchanged 1

I can remember the very first time I realized it was happening, the meaningful short measurement...I was buying lumber almost twenty years ago to put a couple of shelves into a pantry closet in an apartment that we had just moved into...I went to the local lumber yard and gave in my measurements and the cutter spent about ten minutes explaining to me how all of the large sheets ALWAYS come short in one dimension, but I really was getting the square footage that I ordered.
Then, years ago, on a trip to Anguilla, we discovered Vic's Popcorn in large bags, which have shrunk from 8 ounces to 5.5 to 4.5, the paper outer sack remaining the same size, the inner foil sleeve always becoming smaller and smaller.
The next time it happened when I noticed was when the price of coffee spiked several years ago, and a can of coffee, always one pound, suddenly held only 14 ounces. Then a pint of ice cream only contained 14 ounces, although the cost was the same. Haagan Dasz (sp??)tried to soften the blow locally, running specials so that the buyers might not notice in the ecstasy of cost savings.
During the past week, She finally found just the right shade of blue to paint the last small bedroom, and purchase a gallon...except it wasn't a full gallon, just 3 quarts and 14/16s, not the full four quarts.
I'm not stupid, I understand just what's happening. But it doesn't make me feel any better about it.