I’m mathphobic. Numbers make me completely nuts, especially when I have to scale up or down a recipe.

“Who left this long division on the bench,” asked Flour baker Keith Brooks, waving a paper towel with calculations written on it. I ‘fessed up. Sheepishly.

“What? I’m impressed. It’s so old school. Everyone else here uses a calculator,” he said, looking around at the 20somethings buzzing around the bakery.

I love Keith. He was the only baker closest to my age – probably by a decade and a half – when I worked at Flour’s Fort Point Channel location two years ago. He, too, knew of this apparently lost science of long division. I miss him.

In King Arthur Flour’s bread baking classes, I was introduced to Baker’s Math — yes, there is such a thing. Bakers don’t think in cups and teaspoons. They think in percentages and that gives me a migraine.

And fractions? Don’t even.

“Laura, I have told you 500 times,” my exasperated husband yells from our TV room. “Three-eighths is .375.”

“Oh, right. Thanks, honey,” I say sweetly from the kitchen where I vigorously erase my calculations then growl like Marge Simpson.

Now, let’s talk about tipping. I need to pop an Ativan before I am faced with adding a percentage to a restaurant bill. I stare at the slip of paper for 5 minutes as I calculate in my head an appropriate gratuity — as in one that says “thanks for the great service” not “I want to have your babies.”

BTW, I wasn’t a fan of Gov. Deval Patrick, but the Dem was dead to me in 2009 when he hiked up the Massachusetts sales tax to 6.25 percent. So what if the old 5 percent tax wasn’t filling the commonwealth’s coffers? It was a godsend for the math-challenged that needed to triple or quadruple the tax in order to figure out a decent tip. As a foodie, the man should know these things.

And if the sales tax hike wasn’t enough to send us screaming towards the funny farm, now there are these new-fangled, tablet point-of-sale systems like Toast, Breadcrumb and Square, where you are faced with tipping while the server watches you.

It’s too much pressure. Do check out my friend Beth Teitell’s story in today’s Boston Globe if you don’t believe me.

Look, I don’t need to break out in arithmetic-fueled hives in front of a hipster who just handed me an overpriced pastry. I’m already a nervous wreck for just ordering the damn thing for fear my mother will find out. (She doesn’t buy ‘research’ as an excuse – even if I just take a couple of bites. Did I mention I’m 53 years old?)

I first encountered this tip-while-we-wait technology at Blackbird Doughnuts in Boston’s South End. I paid $18 for a half-dozen ($3 each, right?) and $2.50 for a small decaf. Again, this is not an everyday occurrence. I just had to see what all the foodie fuss was about.

The bill came to $20.68. For those of you math whizzes, only the take-away coffee was taxed since I bought 6 doughnuts. If I bought 5, I would have been taxed. It’s a Mass. Dept. of Revenue thing.

Anyway, I handed over my debit card to the server and she swiped it on their Toast point-of-sale system. She then turned the tablet’s screen around so I could sign my name and do some math.

I looked up at the woman in horror and she smiled. But I got so flustered about being pressured into on-the-spot calculations, I panicked and didn’t leave one. It’s not because I’m cheap, just dumb.

The Blackbird girl didn’t look happy. Well, I wasn’t exactly thrilled.

In Beth’s story, she cites a recent survey that found when “the server is looking on, 41 percent of people are more likely to tip. An equal number said it would have no effect on their tipping, according to Software Advice , a Texas-based information technology firm.

“Eighteen percent said the server’s proximity would make them less likely to leave a tip.”

Damn right. Those people are mathphobics. Don’t. Pressure. Us. Because, in the end, it will cost ya.

 

Tags: arithmetic, bethteitell, blackbirddoughnuts, bostonglobe, math, mathphobic, pointofsale, POS, POSsystems, salestax, tipping