Trouble with Mathematics

I consider myself to be reasonably intelligent.  I am fairly adept at realizing when statistics, graphs, and the like are attempting to mislead the general public.  In my former life as a middle school math teacher, I used to teach my students about how easy it is to confuse someone with numbers, and encourage them to be on the lookout for situations in which this occurs. I encouraged them to double-check their work so they would not get a problem marked wrong because of a simple error. Never in a million years did I suspect that mathematics would one day cause me trouble.

I sat down this morning and paid the bills. That has been my job ever since Pig and I got our first joint checking account. I realized we had a bank statement mixed in with the bills, so I figured I'd take a moment and balance the checkbook. This should have, in theory, been quite simple for someone who used to be the Treasurer of the local teacher's union, right? Wrong.

My first issue was that we never keep a running total in the checkbook. People sometimes stare over your shoulder as you write a check at the store, and I have no desire to let them know how much money Pig and I have. We don't quite trust ourselves with online banking, so we are still writing a number of checks every month. This means that, should an error in my accounting occur, I am double-checking quite a few numbers.

The second issue is that Pig sometimes forgets to print out his paycheck deposit slips. It is kind of hard to add in numbers that you don't know for sure. Normally, I would just trust the bank and presume their numbers are accurate, but our bank had identity issues in recent history when they attempted to switch computer systems, so I do not want to rely solely on the bank's information on deposits.

My next issue is that I am using a super-cheap calculator that has tiny buttons that stick. I have to re-enter numbers quite often, and whenever a discrepancy occurs, I have to go back and start all over. Most of the time, I manage to balance the checkbook the first or second time I plug in all the numbers. Not so today.

I added, subtracted, double-checked numbers, and recalculated a dozen times. I went through yet again to make sure I was properly adding together all of the checks that had not been returned to the bank. I double-checked the missing paycheck deposit slip numbers in case I had copied them into the checkbook incorrectly. I spent hours trying to desperately figure out why the checkbook totals were off from the number the bank statement claimed I should have. If it was just fifty cents off, I probably would have given up and rounded to the number the bank stated.  I could not do that with my difference of almost two grand. The worst part was that after all of that time and double-checking, my numbers were exactly the same as they had been when I first started. I was close to tears and wondering how on earth I could have messed up so badly.

This is when we come to my final issue with mathematics: Mommy brain. You see, I did wind up figuring out my error eventually. Turns out, I never flipped the bank statement over to page two in order to continue marking off returned checks. I was subtracting those checks twice, thinking they had not been deducted by the bank yet. Once I rectified that situation, my numbers matched the bank's numbers perfectly.

I learned two things from this experience: The devil really is in the details, and Mommy brain trumps Math Teacher Brain any day.