Warning: Don't Try To Add When You're Sick!

I've been sick for the last week or so. It's getting very annoying.

Today I tagged a new item. Each item came in a box. Those boxes were shipped in bigger boxes. In each bigger box there were three layers of smaller boxes. Each layer had four boxes. There were two bigger boxes.

I did well in math. In fact, I quite liked calculus. And if you give me a pen and paper (or a calculator), I can do arithmatic. But arithmatic in my head? No. And especially not when I'm sick.

I looked at the bigger box, carefully counted the three layers, noted that there were four boxes in the top layer, and concluded that each box had sixteen boxes. Then I painstakingly (and I mean painstakingly) added sixteen plus sixteen. It went something like this: sixteen is ten and six. Ten plus ten is twenty. Six plus six is ... umm... umm... twelve. Twenty plus twelve is twenty-two. No, wait, that's not right. Twenty plus twelve is ... ummm...errr....ummm.....thirty-two!

I looked at our paperwork and was quite surprised to see that we were supposed to receive twenty-four. I thought to myself, "Well, maybe they sent more than they were supposed to, or my boss wrote down the wrong number." So I checked the packing list. It also said twenty-four.

I went back to the boxes and stared at them for a while longer. I counted the boxes in the top layer. I re-counted the layers. I made sure that both boxes had three full layers. I thought about it a while longer.

Eventually I realized that three layers of four boxes makes twelve per box, and since twelve times two is twenty-four, we had received the correct number of items.

Whew!