Petition to pay all workers in every profession a robust living wage and abolish tipping so that I never have to do maths ever, ever again.

No, but seriously: As an autistic person with dyscalculia, tipping is a fucking nightmare. "Please be fully aware of and then enact upon this set of largely unspoken social protocols that can and will shift depending on various factors, including but not limited to culture/location, seniority, and general inflation, and then convert the decimal to a percentage. Show your work by converting the answer to cash, of which you don't have the proper denominations to offer without more social interaction and maths." FUCKING KILL ME.

A piece of advice for people: if you take your total and move the decimal one slot to the left, that’s 10 percent. If you double that number, you have 20 percent.

For example, if your total comes out to $34.49, then $3.449 (I usually just round to 3) is a 10 percent tip, and $6 (or $7 if you round after doubling) is a 20 percent tip.

Rounding to the full dollar in your tip also means you don’t have to do any math with the cents, just carry them down.

Okay but like, the whole point is that this isn't easy for people with dysgraphia. And OP is getting a lot of advice that, while well-meant, misses the point: this stuff just isn't that easy for them, and the whole point is they don't wanna have to do anything like this, no matter how simple it seems to others.

I really think we ought to generally adopt something that a friend of mine on FB started & which has been very useful for me both on FB and Twitter: ending a post with "No advice."

Setting that boundary is wonderful.

Moving the decimal over doesn’t address the “largely unspoken social protocols” that determine who to tip and how much. Also tipping is not objectively unnecessary. Pay all workers in every profession a robust working wage. Period. It should not be a controversial statement. People working a job, any job, should be able to support themselves with that job. If the job is important enough that it needs someone to do it, then it is automatically worth the cost it takes to support someone economically.

i know this won’t help in all situations, but when i got my first tattoo, i just straight up asked my tattoo artist what was appropriate in the way of a tip.

i said something along the lines of, “since this is my first time, i’m not sure what i’m supposed to do, but i want to make sure to tip you well. can you tell me what percentage is normal?” and she was happy to tell me that 20-30% is considered a good tip.

asking is a bit awkward, yes, but less awkward than just trying to guess what you’re supposed to do and not knowing if you’ve gotten it right. the person whose services you’re paying for obviously wants to be tipped well, so they appreciate the fact that you’re making an effort, and their appreciation of your effort goes a long way to smooth over the awkwardness.

everyone should be paid a living wage, of course, but until that time and when in doubt, try to find someone to ask.

ps: i also try to tip workers in cash whenever possible, so they can pocket the money without having to pay exorbitant taxes on it. whenever i place an instacart order i put a small tip on the app then leave some cash in an envelope taped to the door so they don’t have to report it.

while these are also good ideas, the OP point still stands, that a comfortable living wage would be infinitely better than all the life hacks required for some of us to get tipping right (and i do include myself)

I wish I could make more people understand that, when it comes to things that involve sequencing, physical prowess, right/left differentiations, mathematical concepts, etc. I can’t just learn how to do them the way the average person does, I have to learn how to learn them first. 

I can’t just say “Okay, according to the tutorial, this is how you do X,” I have to say “All right, how can I make my brain understand that this is how you do X.” 

And there isn’t a tutorial for making your brain understand the tutorial! It’s like having to answer a fucking sphinx’s riddle every time I want to directions I can process. That’s why I give up on so many things, or take longer to do them than most people. Because you got directions you could read and I had to stand on a bridge for two months arguing logistics with a fucking troll. 

Dyscalculia is a learning disability, a lot like dyslexia, but with math and numbers. Everyone knows what dyslexia is, but for some reason, dyscalculia isn’t as well known. I want people to know about this so no more kids are gonna believe uneducated adults who tells them that they’re just lazy and no more kids are going to think they’re just hopeless idiots when they try and try but just can’t understand. It happened to me, and I won’t let it happen to anyone else.

It’s surprisingly common and is often linked to ADHD. If you’ve ever had issues, look it up - you might find things fall into place for you, too.

I can’t even comprehend what it might be like being a human who doesn’t have all of these characteristics. I don’t know how a brain can possibly just “remember” how to do long division or know what ten feet looks like.

I can’t even accept that a car is more than like nine feet long. Ours is fifteen feet long, and even standing next to it, my brain is POSITIVE it’s small enough to fit in a bathroom.

This is the most me thing I’ve ever read on this site. I can’t read analog clocks I can’t recall number sequences etc.

WELL THEN

I have this! It wasn’t really a “thing” when I was growing up, so I was just inexplicably “bad at math” and had “poor spatial skilled,”’etc. Sometimes I wonder what I could have accomplished if this had been a more well-known disorder.

Why Dyscalculia awareness is so important

I’d like to take a second to list all the people I wish had known more about dyscalculia growing up:

My first grade teacher, who noticed when on a verbal counting test that I went from 99 to 100 to 200 and told my parents I just needed a little practice

My third grade teacher, who couldn’t understand why I would turn in a timed multiplication table test with absolutely nothing written on it, or burst into tears when asked to bring it home and have it signed by my parents

My school corporation, who placed me in advanced mathematics for two excruciating years based on aptitude tests, apparently unaware that aptitude and ability are not one and the same

My fifth grade teacher, who privately admonished me for “laziness” because I couldn’t stop making “silly mistakes”—like switching multiplication and addition, or flipping numbers like three and eight, or failing to follow every step of a math problem

My sixth grade math teacher, who publicly called me out for writing the formula for the Pythagorean Theorem on my hand, claiming I didn’t study, though I had spent five hours the night before preparing

My parents, who grounded me every time my report card came out, trying their best to discipline what they thought was laziness

My family doctor, who, once told about my math troubles, prescribed me ADD medication without any running any kind of diagnostic

My Algebra teacher senior year after I was diagnosed, who claimed that giving me extra time on my test would be “unfair to the other students”

Every teacher who ever laughed and pointed at the clock when I asked them what time it was

The boy in my band class that said I was the “stupidest smart person he’d ever met”

My former boss, who when I told I had dyscalculia told me “I probably have it too, I am always mixing things up!” (she was an accounting major and ran the accounting portion of that place of business)

But you know who would have really benefited from knowing about dyscalculia? Me. I wish I had known. I wish I could go back and tell my ten year old self that it wasn’t my fault, that I am extraordinary in the best way. I wish someone, somewhere along the way could have seen what was really going on.

That’s why dyscalculia awareness is so important.

oh my god.

I. had no idea this was a thing. looked up the symptoms and

‘inability to tell, at a glance, how many objects are in a small group’ 

THIS. THIS IS A THING? THAT OTHER PEOPLE HAVE? 

‘struggles with directions, anxious about moving from one location to another’ 

I memorized the route to all my classes in high school and yet if I didn’t have COMPLETE AND UTTER FOCUS I would STILL GET LOST it was so unbelievably stressful

‘is constantly late because struggles with understanding the passage of time’

‘struggles to read analog clocks’

‘moves too fast or too slow’

‘struggles with basic math/memorizing math facts like times tables and formulas’ 

GOD. I spent MONTHS on those times table tests; long after everyone else had gotten theirs done, I was still taking and retaking those awful, awful tests. 

And I still have to turn everything into addition to get it to make sense. 10-7? count up from 7 to 10, on my fingers. do it again to make sure I’ve done it right. 4x6? that’s 6+6+6+6.  keep track of it on my fingers. do it again to be sure. 18/3? start adding threes together, keeping track of how many it takes, on my fingers. do it again to be sure. STILL SOMETIMES GET IT WRONG because even addition is hard. 

just.

dyscalculia. 

is a thing.

thank you for this post.

I see people trash-talk Tumblr all the time but I’ve lost track of how many people have said something JUST LIKE THIS about their mental or physical health, their gender or sexual identity, and their understanding of social issues or world politics during the less-than-18-month I’ve been here than at any other website or classroom I’ve ever had a presence in.

I literally didn’t learn that I might have dyscalculia until I was studying to be a teacher and had to learn what the hell that was. And oh hey, look, I have practically every symptom but I’m about to graduate and there’s really no point in me putting forth the money to diagnose anything. Seeing kids FINALLY get something in math after working really hard at it, only to forget by the next day, JUST like I used to do, but knowing there’s nothing I can do to stop that. All I can do is teach them the little tricks I learned to remember and figure stuff out and get around the fact that I knew only about half the times tables. 

HOLY MOTHER OF PIE. 

@taraljc, look at this IT IS US. 

(Most of my symptoms have been mitigated or alleviated by technology and I would like to tell my third grade teacher: fuck you, I have a calculator with me at all times and I do not need to know my times tables FFFFFFFFF and I am not stupid or lazy for not being able to learn them)