Like most things that aren’t pretty, it started simply enough, with a run to the store for candy.
I look forward to Halloween every year.
I enjoyed the years when our children were small, and now that I have a grandson, every kid walking up our walk is another grandchild of mine — a courtesy extended each Halloween even to those who seem old enough to shave their faces or legs.
Even for those who shave both, the Halloween Deal is the same: If you show up in a costume – or at least an outfit Grandpa interprets as a costume — you get a couple of pieces of candy, a smile and wishes for a Happy Halloween.
It was with that in mind that I went shopping.
Taking a look at the various bagsful of bulk candy, I recognized the kind of straightforward mathematical puzzle that, back when I was in elementary school, was called a story problem.
Mine would have read like this: Grandpa is buying candy for trick-or-treaters and has two bags to choose from. Help the hopeless geezer decide which is the best for his money so he can defend his actions to Grandma when he returns home.
So you can feel the drama as it unfolded, I’ll write what happened from here on in the present tense.
Adopting what he thinks is a clever strategy, Grandpa decides to see what the bag lists for the number of pieces per serving, cut that in about half for the two pieces he wants to hand out to each kid, then come up with the number of kids he can serve per bag and compare the prices between bags.
“Boom,” he says to himself, “problem solved.”
(For the moment, we’ll skip over the fact that Grandpa should never say “Boom” because it makes him sound ridiculous.)
Bag A cooperates by providing the information Grandpa needs for his story problem, but Bag B immediately tosses Grandpa under the Old Folks Home bus.
It lists how many piece per serving, but under the servings per container says “your guess is as good as mine.”
Actually, it says “variable,” which means the same thing: That the bag isn’t going to tell you.
Wondering for a moment why any candy seller would withhold the information, Grandpa blames an unknown lawyer with hideous hair who makes his money suing candy companies if they provide incorrect estimates of servings per bag – a gig said lawyer took because he couldn’t make it representing victims of mesothelioma in class action suits advertised on TV.
Not recognizing the sucking feel of the Rant Vortex, Grandpa concludes the hideous haired lawyer got into that racket because counting the number of pieces of candy in a Halloween bag hit the sweet spot in his useless son-in-law’s talent range.
That thought must have reflected on Grandpa’s face because, at that time, a nice young man at the store makes an attempt at Rant Intervention by asking if Grandpa needs help.
Confident he can climb out from under the bus by himself, Grandpa says no, and then calmly decides he’ll check the number of servings per ounce, divide that into the number of ounces in the bag and, for a second time says “Boom! Problem solved.”
Well, there’s no fool like an old fool.
Following consumer regulations intended to thwart the hideous-haired lawyer and his useless son-in law, the package lists a different size serving size for each of the five candies involved. Although beginning to lose his grip, Grandpa again calms himself and decides to estimate the average weight of serving by ounce and do the math from there.
It’s when Grandpa realizes the weight of serving is listed in grams and not ounces that he senses two things: The shadow of the larger city bus under which he’s being thrown and the sucking power of the Rant Vortex which, by now, has him firmly in its grip.
Because the prospect of a grilling from Grandma is the more frightening alternative, he doesn’t sense the sucking power. Grandpa instead strengthens focus, seeks out the nice, polite young man who previously offered assistance and asks the young man to pull out his cell phone and find out how to convert grams into ounces, unaware that his question has most people in the store wondering whether he’s a heroin dealer.
By now, of course, Grandpa needs rehab of a different sort. He’s in fact so far removed from reality that he asks someone at the store’s service counter for a pencil and paper so that he can do the long division by hand.
Of course, no one has spoken the words “long” and “division” together for decades, much less done it in public. The sane and easier thing, of course, would have been to ask someone at the service desk to pull out a calculator or ask the nice young man with the smart phone to do the work.
Because of Grandpa’s failure to do so, everyone avoids further conversation with him, though they do manage “Thank you, sir” as they silently pray that he’ll proceed immediately to the exit.
Grandpa’s delusion that he is riding a wave of success then continues when he arrives home, tells Grandma how events unfolded, and is pleased when she decides not to inquire further.
And that goes to show you, being in a Grandpa Rant Vortex isn’t all bad.
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