30 Minute Story A Day - Algorithm & Blues

The man on the TV show says that everything is math.

Personally, I've always thought that man was insane.

You see, math makes me inordinately depressed. And I'm a cheerful person. If everything was math and math makes me depressed, then I could not be a cheerful person. See?

I said I was a cheerful person, not necessarily a logical one.

Unfortunately I do know that math makes up a lot more of my life than I know. More than I like, for sure. And there's no question that at this very moment, math is causing me considerable pain and most likely going to make me wind up in jail. The clink. The pokey. The big house.

You see, I am currently robbing a bank because of math.

Oh, math couldn't just be satisfied to torment me all through school. It couldn't gain its pleasure by just making me tear out my hair when I try to balance my checkbook. Math couldn't be content with confusing me on an almost daily basis. No, it had to go above and beyond to completely ruin my life.

It all started with snack food. I really wanted a cupcake after my morning meeting. I work hard. I'm a hard worker. I'm a girl who deserved a cupcake. I perused the aisle of the local coffee shop until I saw one gloriously large chocolate cupcake with a 'day old' sign proclaiming it to be 33% off. I foolishly ignored the math and marched up to the counter with a dollar in my hand only to be terribly embarrassed when the checkout girl told me it was more. Instead of making the others in line wait while I fished out change, I just took out my debit card and paid, silently cursing math all the while.

Since I had never quite grasped the math involved in percentages and the coffee shop had never quite grasped the idea of just writing a price on their cupcakes, I now had to make a trip to the bank and switch money over from my savings to checking. I finished my cupcake on the way, which made me sort of forgive math for it's dirty little 33% trick and I entered the bank to find all the teller lanes empty.

Of course, that was because everyone was currently lying on the floor. I stared in shock at the huddled customers and then stared dumbly at the two armed robbers standing in front of me. I would have stared in some other sort of emotion except my brain kicked into gear and told my feet to take me back out the door. I probably would have made it except there was this potted plant and a counter and, oh yeah, those two guys with guns. I ended up on my butt next to a ficus and staring up at two guys who looked even more confused than me.

They also looked angrier than me, but that honestly could have been the guns. Or the fact that I had just recently consumed 1/3 of my weight in chocolate and my serotonin levels hadn't quite come down. It took several minutes to convince them that I was not a cop, a fed or a highly trained and beautiful assassin. They didn't use 'beautiful' but I'm sure it was implied. After discovering that I was nothing more than a girl on a math-based errand, they were eager to tell me to move over with the other customers. Until, once again, math interfered.

I was standing in front of the robbers when a high pitched alarm rang across the room. There were screams and shouts and shots and I dove to the floor in a graceful and expedient manner. Which meant I stumbled over into the nearest robber and fell on my butt, again. There were sheepish explanations from the elderly man in the corner who said his watch alarm was just alerting him to take his meds but I was too busy being yelled at by the robber I had knocked over who had somehow twisted his ankle. My landing on it, despite his frankly rude declarations, probably had nothing to do with it.

Robbers, apparently, have plans. These things are not entered into lightly, and therefore, plans are made. Plans, that despite my interference, needed to be carried out with two people. By virtue of being totally and completely at fault, I was drafted into helping. I knew I was in trouble before we even got behind the counter but the moment the first robber started talking about us moving all those bags, I realized that I was sunk. Math, once more, was laughing in my face. I'm sure the man on TV would have detailed the problem nicely on his chalkboard. 1 girl + 1 robber + 1 gun = 3 bag carrying hands. Take that and divide by the amount of bags, times the length of the bank, throw in a few equations about wind speed and floor quality, toss in a vector or two and you've got...well, you've got something that I probably wouldn't understand but would basically add up to the fact that me and the robber weren't going to be moving all those bags before the cops showed up.

Which, to be honest, I wasn't looking forward to. I mean, I had waltzed into the middle of a robbery, fell over, got up, almost got shot, fell over again, injured a robber, became a robber and was now lugging bags of money out the back door of a bank. I'm sure that I could explain all this to a police officer but I was pretty sure I'd be explaining it from the back of a cruiser. Or a paddywagon. Do they even have paddywagons anymore?

Sure enough, time and math wait for no one, not even a robber and his reluctant but plucky assistant. I was on my 11th trip out the door (and if you want to know how many bags I had moved you can just call up the man on TV and ask him for the math) when sirens and lights and lots of shouting stunned me to a halt. I immediately raised my hands before realizing that made me look guilty. I dropped my hands before figuring that guilty was better than shot. I raised them again and realized that lifting two sacks of money was heavy enough without doing some sort of exercise routine with them in front of the entire police force and dropped them onto the pavement.

I was about to start my very long explanation of how none of this was my fault when robbers number 1 and 2 came careening out of the bank. There was more gun waving and shouting and several times when the pronoun "we" was used and I tried in vain to explain by miming that "we" didn't include "me". But since I was standing all of about 3 feet from two armed robbers with a couple of sacks of money at my feet, I'm not sure it got across. It's possible I also suck at miming.

To me, it looked like it was all over but the arresting, but at one simple sentence I knew that things weren't going to be resolved so quickly. When the officer in charge shouted about how we "had to the count of 10" I sighed in resignation. Math had been out to get me all day, I knew it wasn't ready to give up yet.