The simplest calculations don't always quite add up

In a desk drawer at work, never out of reach, sits a scratched up, beaten up calculator.

I have used it to break down $200 million county budgets. I have figured gas mileage and Hall of Fame statistics. I can’t even think of how many election nights it’s gotten me through.

And I’ve never put a battery in it.

When I came to work for The Examiner – the first time, that is, 24 years ago – I decided a good copy editor should have a calculator. Always do the math – twice.

I bought the calculator at the Susquehanna Kmart and probably paid 10 bucks for it. The fact that it was solar powered was nice, but I don’t recall it being the main selling point. Come to think of it, calculators themselves had been exotic and new only a few years before that.

And solar-powered too? Cool, I thought. Of course, someday soon – surely in much less than a quarter century – we’d all live in solar-powered houses, drive solar-powered cars and probably use solar-powered waffle irons. We knew this to be true because we grew up watching “The Jetsons” and the country had come through a period of earnest discussion about the need to change our ways.

Silly me. Just because something can be done and something makes a lot of sense, that doesn’t mean it’ll happen. Never underestimate the path of least resistance and the human desire to cling to our ways.

(Some diehards were still holding out for the metric system in those days, and that never flew either, so maybe our deep-seated resistance to change and progress isn’t always a bad thing. Still, because I went to school in the ’70s, I can convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, or the other way around, quickly and without a calculator, thank you. It’s a neat parlor trick – next time you’re in Canada. Also, as with being the only one in the newsroom on election night who knows how to figure percentages, it inspires a certain amount of oohing and ahhing.)

Funny thing about that calculator. It’s never given me any trouble. It just goes and goes and doesn’t even get any sun. It really runs on whatever office light it can slurp up while I’m figuring out how many seasons Mark Teahen of the Royals would have to play to get 3,000 hits (ahem, at his current pace he’d have to play through 2027, and he’d be 46, and we still won’t have made the playoffs).

And I’ve not spent a dime on it or put anything in the landfill on account of it since the day I bought it.

The little calculator that could will not save the planet, but it does seem odd that simple, beneficial technologies that we’ve talked about for years really do work and really don’t get used.

In school, we were taught many things: how to construct a sentence, that Gettysburg matters, that geometric proofs matter, that computers one day soon would revolutionize everything, that history is one unending march toward progress and sunshine.

Baloney. History is messy, and progress comes in fits and starts, at best. The Book of Proverbs reminds us that “time and chance happeneth to them all.” And in Harry Truman’s town, we of all people should know that individual decisions matter, for good or ill – even if it’s 10 bucks for a calculator.