My Calculator Lies

Really.

He does.

Every month I have the pleasure of balancing the checkbook.

It is a well known fact I have a tenuous relationship with math……banks are not my favorite institutions and inanimate objects and I don’t get along very well.

Put them all together and it does not bode well for a happy ending.

Then throw in the fact that my calculator lies, and….well……..

You can see how this could go terribly, terribly wrong.

Husband runs away when he sees the bank statement in the mail.

I don’t blame him.

I spend several days heaving heavy sighs looking at the unopened bank statement.

Then I suck it up and open the envelope.

I set up a “balancing the checkbook station” with checkbook, copies of the bank statement (because I have been known to get into a snit and rip up the pages upon occasion) pen and calculator.

I sit at the desk and commence to go out of my mind.

I know it’s not going to balance on the first go.

And yet………

Ever the optimist, I try.

And I come close.

Very close.

 Then it happens.

The calculator changes his mind!

Ooooops! Sorry, I didn’t mean $5,293.36 I meant $5,486.96….’my bad’ he says to me.

So I do it again.

Meticulously entering all the months’ sums, I hit ‘equal’………and a THIRD AND COMPLETELY different total appears.

I swear I can hear a mocking tone in his clicks as I enter the numbers.

And I think I can see just the slightest upturn at the corners of his display, as if he’s trying to hold back a smile.

He mocks me.

(I know what you’re thinking, so being proactive, the answers are: Yes, I changed his batteries. Yes, I have tried a different calculator (no comments from the peanut gallery, please!) Yes, Husband has tried to do it. That did not go well either.

:/

………..you don’t suppose I’ve wandered into the ‘ElectronicTwilight Zone’ do you…….?