Yesterday's Embarassing Moment

Yesterday I needed to make copies for a couple of my classes. The first place I went to, a stationary store called Papyrus (trust me, no relation), was having copier troubles so I had to go elsewhere. No big deal, there are a couple of copy machines in this town. I was going to go to Papyrus because I'd been there before and the copy woman was nice. Luckily, the place I ended up going to had a nice copy woman too.

I asked for copies without trouble: 15 copies of one thing, 4 copies of another. Then I asked if I could buy white paper from her. She said I could so I did. I bought 40 pieces of white paper. She punched some numbers into the calculator and told me my total. She said the number really fast and I didn't quite catch it and rather than ask her to repeat, I glanced down at the calculator. My jaw dropped. It read 47. Forty-seven hryven for 19 copies and 40 pieces of paper!

My mind was racing. I was in shock. I know that most Ukrainian teachers don't spend money on copies and I thought, gee whiz, no wonder! That's ridiculously expensive! I pulled out my wallet with a horrified look on my face. I knew I didn't have 47 hryven with me. I knew I only had 45. I started pulling out my bills and counting them. I had a fist-full of ones and fives and twos (yes, they have twos, it's rather nice). I was trying to think how I could ask her to take away a few pieces of paper. I figured it must be the paper that was so expensive, what else could it be?!

So there I was, standing with my heaps of bills, a panicked expression on my face, wondering how I was going to navigate the situation with my language skills when the woman calmly took a 5 from my hand, gave me change and went to help the next person in line. It was then that I took a closer look at the calculator and realized there was a decimal point. It actually read 4.7. I felt incredibly silly. It was embarassing because I know my numbers. I haven't had a 'me standing there with heaps of bills in utter confusion' situation since I arrived in country. Next time, I should probably just ask her to repeat the total.