It’s hard to put into words how much I love Ritz crackers. I would eat them from a box, I would eat them with some lox. I don’t know how long it has been that mankind has been making crackers (some would say it was 1792), but in this day, in this time, I think I can say that we have reached the pinnacle of cracker achievement!
“Ritz” a few more times?
I have a fascination with the study of prices at my local grocery store. If four tubes of crackers is less than twice as much as 8 half-tubes of crackers but only thrice as much as a “fun size” tube of crackers, how many crackers can I get for a dollar? (I’m asking for a friend.)
Well, low and behold, the math is not that simple! What slack-jawed, peasant-minded cracker-lover thought that one could simply count crackers, as if these tasty morsels of wheat and butter could be quantified, ascribing such mundane physics to such mundane ingredients, in such a mundane fashion. Fool! You remain blissfully unaware that such certainty is saved for less quantum mechanics, if you will, than the act of counting crackers.
After what I thought was a thorough analysis, I settled on the package of eight “Fresh Stacks”, as they are called. It looked like about four tubes of crackers, these eight, smaller, “fresher” tubes. Somehow I missed the small print, but eventually, after stocking my pantry with these packages, I noticed it said “about 13 crackers in each stack”, as if counting crackers was not something that could be simply performed by mortals, but rather existed in a constant state of flux. One never knows which midnight snack Shcrödinger might (or might not) want, after all!
I thought about it, though, and I realized, the math checks out. Clearly eight, multiplied by approximately 13, is about 100, so, in theory, this box (well…7 boxes) is a great value! But over time, my happiness decayed, albeit at a fairly constant rate. As each cracker bundle was pulled from its packaging, I would cheerfully count my crackers, only to have my faith in, well, everything, eroded, as I went through box after box where most every tube had 12 crackers, and some only had 11. Eleven! WTF! There is no way any reasonable person would assert that 11 is “about 13.”
The one day it happened. I plucked the tube from the box. I started counting. I got to 11, and time seemed to stretch on, like reading a listicle with too many items, or being stuck in an Uber ride from Hell! I counted number 12 and was playfully urged to sally forth. I traced my finger, slowly, across the 13th cracker, wondering what heaven I was in, realizing that there…was…still…more! As I counted the 14th cracker, I knew, this was something I would remember for all my days.