(Don't) Show Me the Money!

Last night I had a rather infuriating experience while trying to get a pizza. I was on my way home rather late after a collaboration meeting and was feeling too lazy to cook, so I decided to just stop and get pizza on the way home. I phoned ahead to Debonairs round the corner from our house to place the order for pizza and also a 2 litre coke for Chris.

However, when I got there to collect and pay they didn't have any coke, only coke light (yuck), which annoyed me cause the woman who took my order didn't tell me that. So I asked to get a refund for the coke and only pay for the pizza.

The woman who took my order then spent the next 10 or so minutes in a state, looking for change for R20 (the coke was R13 or something) while I waited, wondering what on earth she was doing, just wanting to pay for the pizza and go home.

Finally she found what she needed and put the R13 or so down in from of me. I looked at her like she was mad. "No," I said, "You see, I haven't paid for this yet. I just want to pay for the pizza, not the coke."

"Oh," she says, an obviously automated response.

Feeling smart and still running on the high of finding the correct change, she then whips out this monstrosity of a calculator, takes the cash slip, and works out the cost of the pizza by subtracting the cost of the coke from the total. The fact that this price was nicely displayed not only on their menu but also on the line above on the cash slip didn't seem to register. (And tax is included in our prices here as well, "the price you see is the price you pay", so she didn't even have to deal with that).

Anyway, I smiled my congratulations to her for performing this mathematical feat and gave her the money for the pizza - in exact change, to prevent any further complications.

She then gave me the R13 for the coke.

I couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry, so i just sort of stood there for a while staring.

I decided to give it one last shot, explaining with as much patience as I could summon up at this point, that I hadn't paid for the coke so she didn't need to give me the money back for it, etc, etc. And then I just gave up and left, leaving this woman thinking she'd cheated me out of R13.

Sometimes good karma's just NOT worth the effort!

Comments

[m.visaya]

the gods must be crazy... (ks[2]h)

[Geoffrey Alan Cope]

Karma is always worth the effort, but pizza and coke rarely are... unless of course it's late, you're hungry, there's nowhere else to go, and no one to cook for you....

Then it might be worth it...