Yesterday around 10:10 a.m., I sat down in one of Statler’s swivel Jetsons chairs to take a midterm, wrapping up what I’m sure we all can agree was the easiest and least stressful week ever. Let’s just say my arrival at the test was an accomplishment in itself given my enthusiastic participation in the St. Patty’s Day festivities at Rulloff’s the night before, but I was in good spirits and had at least a liter of Diet Mountain Dew on my side.

The midterm was for my HA 301 class, a.k.a How to Overanalyze Every Basic Decision You Will Ever Make as a Manager (which I believe is officially called “Service Operations” but as long as you require me to take courses involving math I will continue to give them mean nicknames). The course deals with process design, quality management, forecasting and waiting lines. Yep, like how one would reduce the wait time in the Statler salad line. Waiting lines did not particularly intimidate me when I saw them on the course syllabus, but apparently they involve mews, lambdas, exponents and other crap I thought I would never have to deal with again after I furiously tackled (read: barely passed) statistics class.

But despite my best efforts, I guess I’m just not wired to deal with numbers or any sort of quantitative analysis. On this 301 midterm, I got stuck on a particular problem about waiting lines that required the use of mathematics. The question was something about me working at Taco Bell and having to decide whether or not to add an extra cash register to a multiple queue system. Even though I knew exactly how to answer it, I almost couldn’t. Most people would immediately extract the numbers from the word problem and set up the formulas and whatnot, right? I just sat there and tried not to write an essay. I mean, what the hell is this? In my head, the only correct answer was, “When faced with this decision, I would not add an extra cash register. Instead, I would cry because I graduated from an Ivy League hospitality school and am now working at Taco Bell.” This is the way I think. You want to do math problems, I want to write a cheeky essay.

Whatever. I finished the test and celebrated by executing the slam-your-pencil-down-loudly act, a move made famous by the nerdy pimpled kid who sat behind me in 7th grade Texas History class. Obnoxious, yes; but entirely appropriate since the only thing now standing between the Caribbean and I was a four hour flight ... oh, and only the hardest bonus question ever.

Three people arrive at a hotel and split a $30 room. Each guest pays $10. Later, the clerk realizes that the room was only $25, and hands $5 to the bellman to bring back to the guests. On the way to the guests’ room, the bellman realizes it’s going to be hard to split $5 three ways, so he gives $1 to each guest and keeps $2 for himself. Now each of the guests has paid $9 for the room. 27 + 2 = 29. Where is the other dollar?

What?! Mind-blowing. Holy shit — where is the other dollar? I mulled over this question for a solid 10 minutes and the only answer I could come up with was: “What kind of busted ass hotel with a $30 room rate has a bellman? A bellman that steals?”

So I wrote down exactly that (minus a cuss word) and turned in the whole midterm but couldn’t go on with my life not knowing the whereabouts of this dollar. Upset, defeated and confused, I text-messaged the question to the most intelligent person I know, a friend of mine who happens to be an engineer. I anxiously awaited his reply, anticipating the comfort that would come from his not knowing the answer either.

He wrote back almost instantly. “$25 with the clerk, $3 with the guests, $2 with the bellman adds up to $30. Am I missing something?” Ugh. No, engineer friend, you’re not missing anything. But apparently I am: the numbers gene.

In my last column, “Food Lab Confidential,” I made my Sun debut by recounting several of my terrible experiences in Culinary Lab. These incidents were so traumatizing, in fact, that I even went so far as to assert that hotelie Culinary Class is just as hard as an engineer’s stochastic calculus course. Not surprisingly, I received a comment on The Sun website from a fairly distraught engineer challenging me, no joke, to take his math prelims. He said, “In your estimation that [sic] just be easier. I would rather dish up some food, just as long as I don’t have to [edit] my pants for a week straight, wondering how I’m going to fail my pre-lim [sic].” No, new friend, I don’t think that taking your math prelims would be easier. As I’ve proven above, my numbers skills probably pale in comparison to yours. Hell, my numbers skills probably pale in comparison to a giraffe’s.

I just think differently than you do, I suppose. If I were to take you up on your generous proposal and sit down to take your math prelim (which is apparently so difficult that it warrants the use of extra punctuation — I hear “pre-lims” are like, super prelims on steroids), I imagine I would spend the allotted time drawing pictures of polar bears and writing short essays. But, just so you know, a chef who teaches the non-hotelie culinary course once told me the tale of an engineer whose idea of “separating eggs” was removing the eggs from the carton and placing them several inches apart on the counter. You do your thing, I’ll do mine.

But that, darlings, is why I love Cornell so much. It’s a community of people who are all amazing at whatever their “thing” is and, as the legendary Tyra Banks would say, “workin’ what they got” — whatever that may be. Sure, we may not see eye to eye and we may poke fun at each other, but at the end of the day, you can solve my difficult math problems and I can teach you how to separate eggs. Can we please be friends?

However, if you want to stay mad at me that’s fine. If I do end up working at Taco Bell, I’ll be sure to give you something that will really make you “[edit] your pants for a week straight.”

Jenna Bromberg is a junior in the School of Hotel Administration. She can be contactd at jkb34@cornell.edu. Fast Times at Statler High appears alternate Fridays.