Everywhere I Go, People Don't Use Logic

Perhaps more than any other stressor, people not using logic is the one that ultimately adds one more gray hair to my head every day. Conclusions are drawn without using logic almost everywhere I go, and it has become part of the culture to the point that I don't even know if I'm speaking the same language to people anymore.

The event that raised my ire came today when I went to the bank. I will detail to you what I had in my possession: two expense checks, one was $135.81, the other $249.73, two rolls of dimes ($10) and two rolls of nickels ($4). The total comes out to a sweet $399.54, much needed additions to my coffers.

So I go to the teller and I will ignore for a second that the people behind the glass are joking around, stopping to laugh, and generally wasting everyone's time. My issue is when she (finally) gets done with my deposit, she says to me (noting the cents at the end of the deposit), "Oh, and by the way it's .54: you see 3 and 1 makes 4 so it's .54."

Logic.

I am going to assume for the sake of argument that many people come into the bank and they don't add properly, or they don't know how to add at all, or they've never seen numbers before. I know that she misread my "4" and thought it was something else. On further examination, though, I couldn't figure out what number she thought it was.

Instead of assuming that my "4" was askew, she instead decided to take the leap that I just didn't know how to add. Now let's say this was true: I don't know how to add. How in the world would I have come up with the other correct numbers in this sequence? The more difficult numbers to add up are in the middle of the total. So after figuring out these difficult numbers like a savant, I must not know how in the hell 3 and 1 add up?

My response was, "I wrote a 4!" She showed it to me. I looked at it. Looked like a 4. I guess you could figure it was a "9" if the 9 wasn't all the way closed, but I reiterated, "That's a 4!" She still apparently needed to "correct" this on my written deposit.

Only because I know she deals with dumb people all the time did that prevent me from laying into her and spewing expletives that I'd be ejected like Lou Piniella for saying.