Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

I Am A Math God
16 May 2003

The cashier stared down at the neat stack of coupons, wrinkling her nose as if I’d just handed her a fistful of dead bugs. Removing a pen from its holder by her register, she began going through each one in turn, staring at the ceiling and thinking through each computation aloud.

“Half of a dollar eighteen… half of a dollar eighteen…” she chanted, obviously hoping for the Gods of Math to hurl a thunderbolt crackling with the answer.

“Fifty-nine cents,” I offered.

Looking as if she doubted me but more than happy to take my word for it, the cashier went on to the next coupon, cracking the fist-sized wad of gum on which she chewed and carrying on a simultaneous conversation with the next cashier over. It seems – and she was only too happy to whisper the dirt to me, trusting that an anonymous customer would not reveal these dark secrets – that the next cashier over liked the young male employee working his way past with a stack of shopping carts, perfect teeth beaming light and love to all around him.

I will tell no one your secret, I thought to myself, winking this silent confidence to my wife as she waited with me. We exchanged knowing glances as the cashiers giggled, their furtive merriment cut short by yet another coupon that required my cashier’s full attention. I had not known our coupons – thoughtfully prepared by my wife, who has saved me from a bachelor’s existence that would entail buying milk and frozen pizzas at the corner gas station, paying three dollars for a quart of 2-percent – to involve so much arithmetic. I offered a few more halves of sums, then took pity on the poor girl.

“Look,” I said, “you can divide the whole dollar amount in half and then divide the change in half before adding them together. It’s much quicker that way.”

The cashier’s eyes grew wide. “That is a good idea,” she said, awed. “Are you, like, a math teacher or something?”

“Uh… no,” I said, wondering if the details of my twofold life as technical writer and individual author would be considered extraneous by a seventeen-year-old wearing glitter nail polish.

“Well, do you, like, just really enjoy math, or something?” she pressed.

“It’s just a skill they taught us as children,” I said, baffled.

“Oh,” she snapped her gum with finality. “They taught us to use calculators.”

It was then that I knew what it must be like to be a god among mortals. On a planet peopled entirely by her kind, I would be the Math God, adored by all as the bringer of Gnostic wisdom lost to the Ancients. I would tell them how to turn lead into gold. I would teach them how to store lightning in cylindrical devices called batteries. I would encourage them to use their heads and save their feet. I would exhort them to measure twice and cut once. I would show them how to divide whole numbers in their heads.

My lovely wife and soon to be queen at my side, I strode purposely from the place of my birth as a god, pushing my grocery cart before me.

Even gods get the cart with the bad, sticky wheel, it would seem.