• shalafi@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    I do much the same in my head.

    Know what’s crazy? We sling bags of mulch, dirt and rocks onto customer vehicles every day. No one, neither coworkers nor customers, will do simple multiplication. Only the most advanced workers do it. No lie.

    Customer wants 30 bags of mulch. I look at the given space:

    “Let’s do 6 stacks of 5.”

    Everyone proceeds to sling shit around in random piles and count as we go. And then someone loses track and has to shift shit around to check the count.

    • futatorius@lemm.ee
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      3 hours ago

      Yeah, one of my family members is a bricklayer and he can work out a bill of materials in his head based on the dimensions in an architectural plan: given these dimensions and this thickness of mortar joint, I’ll need this many bricks, this many bags of mortar, this many bags of sand, this many hours of labor, etc. It’s just addition and multiplication, but his colleagues regard him as a freak. And when he first started doing it, if you’d ask him to break down his reasoning, he’d find that difficult.