It was a rainy morning. A perfect day to go buy our weekly raw materials at Pasar Tani Shah Alam :)
First stop.....a fruit stall. Bought RM13.30 worth of fruits and gave the seller a RM50 note. She asked me back how much the balance should she gave me. Huh? I was very tempted to say RM86.70...just to see whether she'd just trust the customer to do the math. But thought better of it so I just grinned and said RM36.70. The seller happily counted the money and handed me the requested change. Guess that if i were to say some other amount, she might just gave them away.
Proceeded to fresh section. Selected my various fishes (wonder what their names were), prawns, squids and some other sea creatures that I thought I might know how to cook. If I didn't, many kitchen goddesses were just a YM buzz away anyway. The seller weighted them all and packed in many small plastic bags while at the same time telling me the weight and the cost of each. After the third item, I noticed he expected me to add them up. Gulp! So..RM8.50 + RM8.20 + RM16.00. Okay...so far so good. The man paused in the middle of it to toss my big fish to his colleague at the back and asked him to scale it. Proceeded with counting. Paused again. Tossed my fish head to his friend and told him to cut into smaller pieces. I used the time to frantically double checked my calculation. Based on rusty memory, of course. No prices was written down anywhere. Proceeded with addition. Done. 11 types of various sea animals at RM63.20, all that I added up myself without calculator. He gave me 20 cents discount. Perfect.
Made my way to poultry stall. Asked for daging batang pinang. It was RM20 per kg so simple math. Not that any was expected from me. Bought a chicken later without cracking my head either.
Next...vegies. A few different types as usual. The seller had his math in top form. Unfortunately, while in the middle of weighing and counting and stuffing the greens into plastic bag......his assistant interrupted him. Continued. But not before he asked my confirmation on his last sum. Was it RM6.90? Errr.....think so.
I was so hungry after all those counting, I felt a wee bit dissappointed when I saw hubby bought just enough food for breakfast. I needed more.
I was good at math actually. Or used to. Though I once sent an add math teacher crying to staff room and sulked for days. And annoyed a lecturer during my stage 1 CIMA to no end, until she was forced to announce that I was too playful to pass any exam in my life. But then, years of working with calculator and spreadsheet and those amazing softwares had somehow put that part of the brain into sleep mode. I needed a calculator to count 19+5. Untill recently when I started working from home. Under the same roof with two boisterous boys. Who thought calculator was one of their toys. One by one the calculators ended up in their toys chest and drawers. The calculators naturally comitted suicide as soon as they reached there. Till I ended up with none. Then I was forced to mentally count because driving to stationary shop to get another calculator took longer time than trying to use my head for once. It was free too. There was also this hi tea event that i was co-organising where the other committee thought it was fun to have a meeting while dancing to Hips Dont Lie and left the number crunching to me, the ex-accountant. It didn't help either that these bunch of ladies were so full of ideas that they had to run what if scenarios every few minutes with the cost revised accordingly. It was a wonder I never run into a wall or the pillar yet. But I had millions of misstep in the beginning. If that was not enough, I had a husband who did his number crunching at breakfast table and if I didn't follow from the beginning, I wouldn't know where it would end. And of late, I had this habit of mentally doing business plan in the middle of high impact aerobic. Funnily, that was the time when my rejuvenated brain was most alive.
My add math teacher @ jenan would have been very pleased.
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