Measurement Moron

Here is a funny story.  

The other day I went to the bagel shop deli to pick up some breakfast.  I asked for a dozen bagels and 6 oz or so of sliced Lox.  The girl came back after a few minutes with a puzzled look and asked "6 oz of Lox is barely one slice, do you really want 60 oz?"

Incredulous at the idea of geting nearly four pounds of Lox, I said "No, I want about 6 oz, just slightly less than one-half of a pound."

Acting as if she knew what I wanted, she said, "Oh, OK" and flitted back to the weighing machine.

After I bought and paid for my items, I looked at the package of Lox.  It said exactly 0.60 lbs. 

What do you think happened?  

I guess the deli scale reads in decimal measures of pounds, rather than pounds and ounces. 

And it seems obvious that she did not know the difference between ounces and hundredths of pounds and probably didn’t know there are 16 ounces in a pound.  She may only vaguely realize that pounds is a unit of weight.

Here is my reconstruction of what probably happened behind the deli counter.  Originally, when I asked for 6 ounces, she started putting Lox on the scale.  After the first slice, it probably read 0.06 or more which caused her to come back to me to clarify what I meant by "6 oz".  After I said "slightly less than half a pound", something clicked in her head so she must have known that "one half" was a reading of 0.50, but she still went back to the scale and gave me 0.60 pounds of Lox.

She probably doesn’t even know what she doesn’t know.  She certainly did not ask me, "Ok, I don’t know about 6 oz, do you know what that is in pounds or how many slices?"

SAD, VERY SAD – It seems our educational system is failing our youth in some subtle and not so subtle ways.