The Man Who Killed His Plus Button

Nothing happens when you submit a reimbursement.

You upload one photo. Then you add up what’s on it.

Twelve line items, in the calculator app on your phone.

The plus button is tiny.

You don’t press it. You aim at it.

I missed it twice.

Both times I cleared it and started the sum again from the top, because I couldn’t tell if the second tap had registered.

And somewhere around the fourth addend, I was not in the office anymore.

I was in college, holding a scientific calculator.

You remember those keys. They pressed back. They clicked. You could find the plus without looking, because your thumb already knew where it lived.

That is a strange thing to be nostalgic about. I’m aware.

But I wasn’t done falling.

Because underneath college, there was a wholesale shop, and my dad, and a Casio, and the man who killed his plus button.

Once a month, when I was a kid, my dad took me to get the groceries.

Not the supermarket. The wholesale place, where the sacks are stacked to the ceiling and the floor is slightly slippery for reasons nobody explains.

The owner sat at the counter. He was also the cashier. He was also, as far as I could tell, the entire operating system of that shop.

My dad would simply hand over the list.

The owner announced it. Every item, out loud, at a volume that made it clear the announcement was not for us.

Five litres of coconut oil. Ten kilos of rice. Two kilos of wheat flour.

And this man never looked at his calculator.

He knew the rate of everything. Per litre, per kilo, per packet. No price list, no checking, no pausing. His fingers just went.

The workers were already moving. One of them would disappear into an aisle and come back with the oil. Another was packing. It was choreographed. He read, they moved, and nobody discussed anything.

At the end, they ran the checksum.

The worker called the item. The owner called the quantity.

Coconut oil. Five. Rice. Ten. Wheat flour. Two.

Half duplex, strictly one direction at a time. Nobody ever had to say it twice.

And the owner ticked each one off his list, without looking up.

Beautiful system. Genuinely.

I should have been watching the rice.

I was watching his hands.

That is not the part that bothered me.

Here is the part that bothered me.

Five times the rate. Plus.

Ten times the rate. Plus.

Two times the rate. Plus.

And on down the list. Plus. Plus. Plus.

Back then it was just a key he kept hitting.

I read that as increment by one now. Occupational damage.

And then the last one. Louder. Harder. You heard that one.

That was the full stop.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

And then he’d read out the total.

He never hit equals.

Not once. Not ever. In years of monthly visits, I never saw that man press the equals button.

His calculator was a Casio. The equals button was large, and green, and absolutely pristine. Untouched. Factory fresh.

The plus button had no marking left on it at all.

He had worn the symbol clean off.

He had killed it.

And every single month, standing next to my dad, at whatever height I was at the time, I wanted to say:

Uncle. The equals. It’s right there. It’s the big green one. It’s never been used.

I never said it.

I did ask my dad, once, why he doesn’t press equals.

My dad said it does the same thing.

Which is true. It does do the same thing.

That answer should have closed the loop.

It closed nothing.

Because it was never about the maths.

I didn’t have a word for this for another twenty years.

By then I’d picked a profession that rewards it.

One optimal way to do the thing, and you’re paid to go find it.

Nobody calls that a problem. They put it in the job description.

Then I learned the word. It landed a little too comfortably, the way a shoe fits when you were hoping it wouldn’t.

Anyway.

The reimbursement went through.

And somewhere there is a green equals button that lived a long, full, completely untouched life.

The word OCD is not in the title of this post. It is not in the body.

I decided I could live with that.

Then I put it in the tags.