It's curtains...

Bearing in mind that I've just returned to work after a couple of weeks holiday, you could be forgiven for expecting me to be relaxed and full of mellow good will. Unfortunately, instead of an uplifting and whimsical post about all the lovely things "wot we did on our holidays", I'm going to subject you to a brief rant about dry cleaning.

 [Oh dear... Where's everybody gone?]

We don't normally have much need for the services of dry cleaners, but after a lot of muttering and deliberating about whether to ignore the fabric care label on the living room curtains, Blight-of-my-life decided it would be more sensible to get them dry cleaned than risk bunging them in the washing machine.
After a few 'phone calls, it became clear that there is a surprisingly wide variation in the cost of getting curtains cleaned. To make things slightly more complicated, some shops quote for cleaning by weight of material, while others quote based on the size of the curtains per square metre.

After a only a brief struggle, the curtains were down, weighed and measured. A few calculations on the back of an envelope and it became obvious that the best deal could be had at one particular shop as long as the cleaning was priced by the square metre.

The curtains were duly bundled into the car, then while I suffered the mind numbing tedium of washing all the curtain hooks, runners and rails, Blight sped off to the dry cleaner's.

When she returned, she was not happy.
"Well, that was a complete waste of time."
"Why? What went wrong?"
"I've had to bring 'em back. They're still in the car"
"But why? Why wouldn't they clean them?"
"They couldn't take them because their computer's not working."
"What? I didn't realize that the cleaning was computer controlled..."
"It's nothing to do with the cleaning. It's the computer they use to calculate the cost of cleaning that's faulty."
"Couldn't they just work it out with a pencil and paper, like you did? Or even a calculator... It's only multiplying the area of the curtains by the cost per square metre, isn't it?"
"That's what I told them," she said, "but apparently they have to use the computer to do that. They're incapable of calculating area"
"But that's completely stupid."
"It's worse than that. They said they'd give me a price to clean them by weight. They weighed them and quoted me forty quid more than it would be by area."
"Bloody hell... No wonder you brought them back."

So there you have it.
A shop staffed by people who cannot multiply two lengths together to work out the area of a curtain.

Not all the muppets live on Sesame Street...