Bistromathics

You rent a car at $50 a day and it ends up costing you $150 a day.

We perceive this as the cost of all the extras, namely insurance, fuel option, no excess, sat nav, sales tax, credit card fee, etc.

Douglas Adams wrote about bistromathics and car rental is another example of where this weird new branch of maths applies.

It is where numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer’s movement in restaurants or in this case around car rental centers.

Car rental conforms to the third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of bistromathics; specifically the relationship between the number of items on the bill, the cost of each item, and the original quote.

Numbers written on a car rental final receipt presented to the rentee whilst returning the car and also while in a daft dash for a plane do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the universe (except restaurants).

No one has ever noticed because no one has ever properly dissected a car rental receipt. If they had tried they would have failed.

Interestingly, human intuition steps in here. To avoid the ensuing risk of madness our subconscious alerts us and we never get around to toting up these receipts.