I brought the Little Businessman and Co. a calculator. At first, they thought it was a ginormous phone. They were disappointed it didn’t make noise. They wanted to play it like a keyboard or as the people who elect every floor of an elevator might.
They demanded to know who might need such a thing; they can add the cost of two five peso cigarettes and a five peso sucker; that’s 15 pesos. For them, this function is not multiplication, not even addition, and it certainly doesn’t require a machine. A machine Augostino quietly slipped back into my backpack at the end of the night.
