One of my pet peeves is the fact that people don’t know how to make change any more. When I was a kid, my father owned a drug store. I was taught to make change a very specific way, since any screw ups I made was money out of my Dad’s pocket!

I was taught to do two very key things. One was to leave the bill the customer had given you on top of the drawer, and not to put it away until the customer was satisfied that the change was correct. This way a customer wouldn’t be able to say, for example, that he had given me a $20 bill when he had given me a $10 bill. The correct bill would still be sitting out and would not have been tucked into the register. The second thing was to count the change back to the customer, not just hand them a wad of bills. This acted as a double check on the change you were handing back.

Of course, no one can do the actual math to make change, either, since the cash register figures it out.

So, I was having lunch on Monday and my bill came to $4.62. I gave the cashier a $10 bill. She stuck it in the cash drawer, and obviously hit $5.00 on the cash register, because she gave me 38 cents change. I protested that I gave her $10. Fortunately, she agreed with me and gave me the additional $5. But I could have easily said that I gave her a $20 and how could she have proved otherwise?


Did anyone see “The Curse of the Bambino” on Tuesday night? I don’t have HBO, so I didn’t see it. The talk radio folks were really bashing it. Their take is that it made the denizens of Red Sox Nation look like a bunch of desperate, obsessed boobs. So, if you watched it I’d love to know what you thought about it at capnho@hotmail.com.

Sox magic number for the wild card = 8.