The Coffee Shop 1

This morning, I was at St Elmo's Coffee Shop in Del Ray, Alexandria... one of the few shops that's open for sit-down dining quite early after the pandemic.

I usually work out of my apartment for obvious reasons nowadays, but once in a while when I really can't stand it any longer,
I will grab the mask and go outside....

While there, I got my coffee, doughnut, and got to work.

In between typical moments of:

Spam EMAIL: "Hello I am Ravi a Nigerian Prince. I am writing because I need your help with a money transfer..."
Work EMAIL: "John please apply the Oracle January CPU to Production this evening. -K"
Investing: "TICKER TSLA AMZN MSFT ORCL KWEICHOW ..."
FaceBook: "Wanda X and sent you a friend request [Confirm] [Delete]... "
Unix Admin: "cd /etc; tar -zcf ldap | ssh oracle@host23.blah.com "(cd /etc ; tar -zxf -)"
Java Coding: "DateTimeFormatter dateTimeFormat = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyyMMddHHmmss");"
Web Browsing: "CNN BREAKING NEWS: Donald Trump has ... "
Friend Email: "GODDAMN IT JOHN, This is the LAST TIME I am paying your F*CKIN property tax -Randall"

... I notice a mom with her daughter sitting at the table next to me. The mom is teaching the little girl how to multiply using blocks.

The mom lines three blocks on the table. She then asks, "So if I take 3 blocks 1 times, what do I get?"

The little girl, who was probably around 4-5 thinks for a second, she then looks at the blocks and replies "Three!"

"That's correct." replies the mom. "So 3 times 1 is 3."

The mom then aligns 2 rows of three blocks, and then illustrates how 3 x 2 = 6.

This goes on for another hour or so. Towards the end the mom even starts to teach the little girl negative number multiplication using debt.
She wonderfully explained the age-old question about -1 x -1 = +1 using the idea of removing debt. Basically she says removing a money debt is the same as gaining money.

Whoa that is _REALLY_ cool I thought to myself. What a lucky girl to have a parent like that!!

A few moments later, the girl suddenly looked my way and saw that I was looking at them. I smiled and waved back at her and her mother. They smile back at me in return.

"Kid", I said to the little girl. "Don't ever forget how lucky you are. My parents never sat with me at a coffee shop on a weekday and taught me negative number multiplication like that using debt."

"Well thank you." replied the mom smiled smugly.

"Your mom takes you here everyday?" I asked.

"Every day!" replied the mom. She looked back at the girl. "See? The nice man there thinks I'm a good mom!' she replied.

The little girl looked at us somewhat confused.

"But mommy, you should tell that man DADDY is the one that made you take me out everyday because after you got FIRED FROM YOUR JOB he said you were driving him crazy and bankrupt being at home and shopping on Amazon."