Who Steals Calculators?

My smartphone sends me regular news alerts, most of the time about sadly common things like car crashes or gunshots. Once in awhile it’s about something that makes me look twice. Like someone growing a huge tomato or catching a big fish.

But what I read the other day stunned me to the point I froze.

Two people were arrested for stealing twenty thousand dollars’ worth of calculators from a local big box store. What?

Why?

Stealing meat? It’s wrong but people get hungry. Stealing expensive watches, snatch and grab jewelry, well, totally wrong, but at least they’re worth something. And there’s always cash. Good for all debts public and private.

But Calculators? Don’t these people have smartphones?

Before there were calculators we used slide rules advanced mathematics. I still have two of them. One of the projects I thought I’d complete during the Pandemic was relearning how to use the old slipstick, as we called it back then, but my heart wasn’t in it. Learning a dead art like cuneiform might have more useful than relearning a 50’s STEM skill from before Sputnik. At least with cuneiform I could have read Gilgamesh in the original.

Anyway, before we learned how to use a slide rule we used pencils to solve math. There was a 1954 story by Isaac Asimov called “A Feeling of Power” that I read as a teenager. It concerned a future age in which everyone had a handheld computer to perform math, and some lowly technician invented a trick something he called “graphitics.” He amazed his military superiors when he performed mathematical problems with nothing more than paper and pencil. The tech said it had no useful function. He figured it out just for fun.

However the more the bigwigs thought it over, the clearer it became that it had a military application. It might be the breakthrough to win an ongoing war. In the end graphitics was weaponized after which the tech committed suicide in protest.

Only a few years after I read that story calculators suddenly became the thing. The first one I ever saw was in 1972 at college. A math major spent four hundred bucks for the clunky device. That’s closer to three thousand dollars in today’s money. He slept with it to make sure it wasn’t stolen.

By the time I graduated from college four years later calculators cost next to nothing. Companies gave them away as promotional gifts. It was hard not to end up with a free calculator every other week. And already they were performing much more advanced mathematics than four years previously.

Nowadays they come with our smartphones as one of the standard apps that no one uses. What with texting, email, phone calls, a camera for movies and photos, digital music, books, audiobooks, fitness trackers, news channels, sports channels, movie channels, search engines, Amazoning, language lessons, and everything else, why would we spend time performing math? I’ve even got an app that lets me know the odds of seeing the aurora borealis in Nappanee every single day (usually zero).

So why would anyone steal calculators? Are these special calculators? Can you scan one of those jars of candy where you have to guess the exact number inside to win them all and get the right answer? Will they walk your dog for you? Are they like that Antikythera Device in the Indiana Jones movie where you can go back in time?

Inquiring minds want to know!