When You Turn Into Your Mother
I have a distinct memory from childhood. We were in the car, the entire family, in a notoriously windy canyon. I was too young to drive and was in the backseat. We came up to a yellow road sign. You know the kind, the yellow diamond. On it was an arrow in the shape of a ninety-degree turn and then a big bold 25.
“Those signs are terrible,” my mom said.
No one really understood what sign she was talking about, since we were in the middle of nowhere, and we’d only passed the standard sign telling people to slow down for a hairpin curve. When we realized we were all talking about the same yellow diamond sign, my mom continued.
“How are you supposed to know what it is communicating? There are no units on that sign. Twenty-five what?”
My dad, an engineer and very attentive to unit symbols, wasn’t onboard.
“They obviously mean twenty-five miles an hour. That’s clearly a ninety-degree angle,” he said.
“Which is why the sign is confusing. It suggests we are being told that angle is twenty-five degrees,” she said.
“No it doesn’t! It’s not a twenty-five degree angle!” My dad was getting a little passionate about this.
“Well nothing on the sign lets you know they are talking about miles per hour,” she continued.
“The context does!”
“That’s why you label your units! You shouldn’t be inferring units from context.”
My brother, in elementary school at the time, piped up. “Yeah or you crash space ships!”
This answer seemed to satisfy both my parents, and I experienced the feeling that accompanied most of my childhood, that I was the only one in the family who could care less about labeling your units.
Fast forward about thirty years. I’m in the grocery store, the nice one. I was on that side of town and decided I needed a few things, and then suddenly I was at the cheese counter. And they had a nice cheese counter. And I found some goat cheese on sale. The sticker said: SELL BY $4.49.
As someone who also wouldn’t let something like being out of blank stickers slow me down, I appreciated that the cheese price labeler found a way to get me the sale messaging. I picked up the cheese and made my way to the check out. Of course, since we live in the liminal space between humans doing jobs well and robots doing them better and instead now have humans AND robots performing customer service at a terrible level, I went to multiple checkout machines before I found one that worked.
I rang up the cheese. It did not show me the sale’s price. I looked around for the guy I knew was milling about the machines fixing the constant issues with them, and got his attention.
“This says it’s on sale for $4.49 but it’s not coming up at that price.”
The guy looked at it for a second then said, “No, this says this is the sell by date.”
I did one of those rapid sets of blinks and wondered where April 49th had been my whole life. But I didn’t go that route, instead before I could suggest that, I heard myself say, “No. That has a dollar sign. We do not demarcate dates with dollar signs. This is a price not a date. That’s the whole purpose of unit symbols…”
Then my brain caught up to my words, and I quit talking mid sentence. I glanced around. My mom was not there, but here I was continuing her lecture on the importance of unit symbols.
The guy was still looking at the cheese like he had never seen something so perplexing.
“Naw. It’s the sell by date.”
“Can we look it up?” I managed.
And he did. “Well I’ll be,” he said. “It ain’t the sell by date. It’s the price.”
And he scanned it, fixed the price, tossed it in my bag and walked away. The machine then did a hard stop and said an unexpected item was in my bag, and help was on the way, even though he was rapidly putting distance between us.
It was only mildly embarrassing when he got to the other side of the poorly performing robots and saw me waving him back over.
It’s funny what your brain holds onto. My mom would be disappointed by how many family moments my brain didn’t store, but at the same time. I know she’s not disappointed that I’ve religiously labeled my units ever since I was in grade school.
You never know when a properly displayed unit symbol might save your spaceship or your bank balance.