I work at a small pet store, and we sell two things in abundance: dog food and crickets. As for crickets, we sell them at twenty for $1. Now, the store is almost always busy, so we don’t have time to actually count out twenty crickets. We usually eyeball it, keeping our guesstimations on the generous side. Customers dig it because they usually get a few more crickets than they asked for, and we get to save time and generate a little good will.
One day a customer comes in and asks for one hundred large crickets. Let’s call him Clyde. No problem, I tell him. As I’m gathering the crickets into the bag, I ask him about what he’s feeding them to, and we get to talking about lizards, tarantulas, and other cricket-eaters. Clyde seems alright at this point - I genuinely enjoy talking about animals with the customers.
I hand Clyde the bag of about one hundred crickets, and he takes a long look at it, turning it this way and that. He looks at me and skeptically asks if there’s really a hundred crickets there. “Looks like 70 or 80,” he says. Mind you, everyone at the store is very good at guesstimating how many crickets are in a bag; we all know what 20, 50, and 100 crickets look like, and in all the time I’ve worked there, I’ve never been questioned by a customer.
My immediate emotional response was somewhere between annoyance and wounded pride. So, I did the reasonable, logical thing: I took the bag back, and I told him I’d count every single cricket, ‘cause I’ll be damned if he doesn’t getexactly one hundred crickets.
So, I painstakingly count each cricket by dropping them one by one from the first bag into a new bag. He watches me the whole time, making comments here and there like “unnecessary” and “I’m sure it was a hundred.” But nay, I tell him. “I want to make absolutely sure that you get the crickets you paid for.”
As I count my hundredth cricket, I look at the remainder in the bag. Lo and behold, there are ten crickets leftover. A whole fifty cents! As I hand Clyde the new bag of exactly one hundred crickets and toss the rest back into the bin, I thank him for keeping me and the store honest, and assure him that I’ll count his crickets every time he comes in from now on.
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