I was standing in line to pay for my food and drinks in a coffeehouse near the campus of the local university. This was many years ago.
The owner of the place — a then 50-year-old Irish woman — was trying to explain to the man before me how to convert the former local currency to euros (although the switch to the euro happened quite a while earlier, some people still calculated prices using the old currency because they hardly had any feeling about values using the new one).
In this particular coffee house, they still printed bills in both the old currency and in euro.
Since she was actually the one who was really confused, I tried to step in and help her/them out. She had a thorough look at me — young man, scrubby stubble beard, long hair (ALERT), tattoo in neck (ALERT), very wide sloppy clothes — and then started to explain to me very slowly as if I was severely mentally impaired, that maybe this was just A TAD TOO DIFFICULT for “someone like me.”
She also added with a big grin on her face, that I could consider asking some help from the professors of the Mathematics department two blocks further down the road ?
The thing is: I was one of the professors.
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