Julie R. Neidlinger: Lone Prairie Blog

Mixed payment not appreciated.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 4 comments link this post

This Sunday I'm going to a concert. The tickets arrived in the mail today, so I emailed my friend to tell her the news.

I wrote: Got the tickets in the mail today! Ticketmaster has quite an operation...talk about little fees here and there. (I then totaled up the amount, and divided it by two so she would know her half of the cost.) Two goes into seven three times, leaving one, carry over...16...8... ha ha -- that's what I just did in my head.

Her reply made me smile: Sooo, I have 30 in cords...that would leave how much in US?

She was referencing a funny moment from this year's Nicaragua trip, which I attempted to illustrate in this cartoon.

The entire group ate at a nice restaurant in Managua our last night in Nicaragua. We also had some of our Nicaraguan friends as guests, so this meant that when the bill arrived, it was confusing. It's not like heading down to the Green Mill and asking for separate tabs for each person. You get a bill, it's all together, you pay once, and you figure out a way to have each person pay on their own before handing the total payment over the restaurant.

It is here in the story that I wish to interject an important piece of information: I am an art major.

Now, this doesn't mean I'm stupid, but the kind of math I liked was abstract or stuff like geometry. Tallying up and dividing out a meal ticket is not my cup of tea. I have a hard time making change when the pressure is on, and you already know that I can't punch a basic time card correctly.

Yet, I found myself trying to decipher the Spanish and split the included tax, water cost, and tip, plus extract and assign the correct food and beverage to the right party. The messy little scribbled paper you see at the beginning of this post (click to see the back, for whatever reason you'd want to do that) is the slip of paper the waiters left at each plate denoting what we ordered so that when the food arrived, it would be easy to track down. It was tiny, and it was the only paper I had handy.

I finally figured out who owed what, using an 18.9 exchange rate for cordobas to dollars. I figured some would pay in cords, and some in dollars, and so I tallied up a total for each option. It was a "minor" irritation to discover the restaurant was using an 18.7 rate, but there was enough room on the tiny paper for scribbling and arrows and probably the Declaration of Independence had it been necessary.

It was all going well -- just a few mild breakdowns, mutterings, and pounding of the calculator -- until it was Michael's turn.

"You need to give me $17. Or I can give you the total in cords..."

"Here's some dollars," he said, handing me about $10 cash. "And here's some cords to cover the rest of it, however much it will be. How much will it be?"

I snap easily.

Like beans. China. Brittle bones. Spinster ladies with walking sticks and 500 cats.

"Aargh! Not in both! Pick one!" I have a low flash point. I need to work on that.

I don't know how it ended. Probably with some group members counseling me that included suggestions of "settling down", which seemed to be the norm by the end of the trip.

Remember, low flash point.

All that to say that I appreciated my friend's email response.

And I responded back: Well, "Michael", if you throw in four South Beach muffins, $20 in Canadian, five lug nuts, and two gift certificates to Target, we might have something.

Labels: cartoons, clippings, friends, nicaragua 2008

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4 Comments:

I'm not sure why I'm always the one who ends up on the receiving end of the zingers in these Nicaraguan comedies, but you need to remember...all you have to do is not volunteer for cashier duty...seems you're a glutton for punishment...and also that having a couple of lug nuts, several poker chips, and some monopoly money in your pocket does come in handy.

By Michael, at 26/2/08 10:03