Stopped by Lowe's this morning.

Yup.
I've seen that before.

Another thing... if you hire people to work, cell phone stays in the truck.
They can check their messages at break time.
And no mp3 players and ear buds!
Very dangerous when not aware of things going on around them.
and good luck finding self-starting workers!
rc

Not to mention how some workers talk. I've driven up to cvs or mcdonalds and they'll say something and i have to ask three times what they said cuz they don't bother to pronounce their words. And even then i barely understood what words they said. And no its more than one race. Its in alot of races.

She was waiting for someone to text her and tell her what to do... LOL

Computers are okay, but you can't make 'em into a crutch. I learned math in school when PCs were still novelties. Now, at work, I have huge amounts of data to enter, some numbers to crunch, and files to move around the department. Those of us who are old fogies learned that if we use the calculators on the computer screen to crunch our numbers it will actually slow us down. So we run numbers in our heads. If you do this all day, you become lightning quick. The newbies and interns think we're geniuses or something. But it's not that, it's just practice. I can add any two double digit figures in my head in about a second. Triples and quads don't take much longer.
It would just take too long to type these numbers in. We have too much to do, so we do most of it in our heads. It's nothing special; this is what happens to the minds of understaffed, harried government workers who don't have time to mess with letting machines do everything. We become human calculators and day and date computers.
Computers faster than humans? - not always. Smarter? - certainly not! Labor saving devices? - only sometimes.

I think it may be a touch too convenient to blame the tool for the operator's shortcomings... bear in mind the folks you're referencing most likely haven't the slightest clue how to operate a computer beyond Facebook at best...

All tools great and small open up a realm of possibilities, it's developing the ability to recognize the potential that lies beyond, the learning to learn that's falling short - and that has always been the responsibility of our educational system, our teachers, our parents...

...and they're oft stuck in the mindset of the industrial age.

Am I defending the counter drones? Those indifferent, even resentful of any opportunity to enlighten themselves? No, far from it - I find it unfathomable that with the world at their fingertips they'd choose ignorance, obsessed with status updates, confused and angered by the authority of even autocorrect. A perpetuation, even escalation of illiteracy in the comfort of conformity.

Yet... as you sow so shall you reap.

Yes, she's basically uneducated, and likely psychotic as young people tend to be these days-

but she's DRUG FREE!

And I know all people getting older feel this way about kids, but I really think we're putting a lot of really schizoid inducing practice and factors into modern life these days.

But then again- while she stands there confused at the cash register for minimum wage, the people doing the real work for Lowes are piling it up with a bunch of others in the third turn somewhere, and despite tons of worn tires and brakes and shocks and dented fenders and fuel gone quickly up in smoke-

she's not really raising the price of the items for sale at Lowes like their racing teams lucrative Corporate sponsorships. So give her a break.

At least Lowes generally has a wind block around the door, while at Mennards the cashiers have to stand in front of unshielded windy sliding doors all day.

i'm 16 years old. and i am also amazed how little some people at my age knows, but chances are it was her first time practicing for cashier.
she was probably very nervous. at least she bothered to try a job, which is more than a lot of other young people do!
i think some of you are blaming the wrong persons, i think the rot of this problem is that all their idols, all people they look up to are so dumb.
they are not necessarily stupid in real life but on their blogs and tv shows and whatever young people use for real life learning these days.
when a teenager or kid see a person they respect act like a idiot they don't think its for entertainment purposes, they think it's how you should behave in real life. so instead of taking away their computer, show them what you can do when you have some knowledge.
show them what they can use their knowledge for, in today's school you learn how to calculate but not what you can use it for. at least here in sweeden. this is just my opinion, and i'm not saying it's 100% correct but for what i have seen in my years of school it seams to be this problem.

dude I bet you personally made her soo nervous, lol jk but maybe she can give correct change now, or goes back to slinging chicken at chicken shack.

Was she so shaken up by your good looks that she couldn't function?

Steve.

I can certainly understand your complaints about the youth of today. What I find utterly distasteful is your comments to her. When did us more mature folks start saying such hurtful things to younger people. A friendly and helpful reply would have been something like, "So, you owe me 2 dollars and fifty one cents change, right?" We, the older more mature folk are the ones responsible for helping the younger generation learn. And we can't do that by being disrespectful.

I deal with this all the time. Im a Chef and I interview 1 or 2 of these types per week, I dont need them to make change, but recipes call for basic math..it is utter insanity that someone can gradute high school and not know what 1/4 cup plus 1/4 cup equals. Its really sad what is happening in schools, Im not sure who is to blame..parents,students,teachers, or politicians (school funding).. I guess they are all to blame, with the brunt towards Parents who are so unconnected to their kids that they have no clue their child will not have the basic tools to function independently in the real world.

Use of a calculator prohibited on some tests while back in high school or Jr College I guess was not the real reason I got that very simple stuff memorized.

Way back when, the grade school I was going to had strikes for a while and though had some people to take the place of some of the teachers and kept school open, my parents opted to send me to a tutor for doing times tables and some other math for a week just maybe 2hrs a day. It was like a vacation, but I suspect it helped.

I when using a calculator have to really think what the answer should be approximately, just in case a key bounces or I enter a typo.

I also used the TI-55 to use the small programming capability so that when I went to a store to see what parts for an electronic project we had to do for college class, I could check quickly if any permutation of series parallel connections could get me the value I needed with a small enough difference from the exact part.

I would not have needed to find a critical value for the resistor with enough wattage and the ohms is right, but the instructor bought kits and did not have enough for the whole class. I used what parts I could find that match the kit, but the D'Arsonval movement for the meter was not exactly the same and I made a shunt to get it to read full scale. The value of resistor just was not available so by combining in series and parallel a set of resistor I got it near perfect. It became boring to just keep doing the same set of calulations over and over again so I programmed it in.

Parents have an effect that can be helpful by being there to see school is doing right by them, if not?

MT

NunyaBidness said:

I can certainly understand your complaints about the youth of today. What I find utterly distasteful is your comments to her. When did us more mature folks start saying such hurtful things to younger people. A friendly and helpful reply would have been something like, "So, you owe me 2 dollars and fifty one cents change, right?" We, the older more mature folk are the ones responsible for helping the younger generation learn. And we can't do that by being disrespectful.

Click to expand...

very wisely said!

I am a custodian at a rural High School . I see many students that are not the kind of people I would have wanted my kids to hang out with when they were in school . These kids show very little consideration for others . They have to be fed junkfood every 30 minutes. They barely can dress themselves . And they are attached to a battery operated device that stops them from thinking on the fly . And then I go down to the Ag class and Ag shop . When I enter the room I see the most respectful, considerate, mature, self aware bunch of boys and girls that ever walked these floors . And it is consistantly so year after year . They are children of farmers . And the children there who did not come from the farm learn from them and act like them . It is an oasis in a sea of stumbling education .

some one get that girl an abacus Stat!