Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Teensy Rant

I'd like to talk about decimals.  I'll start with the "Our children's room non-fiction collection is so small that I don't see the point of going out three spaces, much less four."  I understand that there is a jobber who does all this work for us so we don't need the MLIS's cataloging in-house and that company apparently can't discriminate between juvenile and adult collections (maybe without charging more), but still ...

Next up: Y'all, decimals are just like money.
Which is worth more: $90 or $97?
Let's put some numbers in front.
Which is worth more:
$56,790 or $56,797?
$567.90 or $567.97?
Okay, take that zero away.   [Occasionally the jobber puts the zeros in, but they're supposed to leave it out.]
Which is more: 567.9 or 567.97?
What if money were broken into even smaller pieces?  Let's look at this. 
Which is worth more: $900 or $912?
How about 567,900 or 567,912?
Which is more: 567.9 or 567.912?
Here are some trickier ones.
What's worth more: $970.40 or $970.04?
How about 970.4, 970.04, and 970.004?
Or 970.1, 970.004, 970.4?
That was easy, wasn't it?  So, tomorrow when I go to shelve some books, I don't want to see 398.209 coming after 398.24 or smack in the middle of the 398.2s.  Ithankyew.

Next week: The Alphabet.

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