By Jennifer Valentine

Let me tell you a story about math, karma, and candy. It’s sweeter than it sounds, I promise. You see, I work at a candy store, and this particular candy store started a jellybean counting contest. We had a bunch of old jelly beans and put them in a giant martini glass, and we charged people fifty cents to guess how many beans were in there. The winner got a $50 gift certificate for the store. It was a fifty for fifty guess lotto. They never told me how many were in there, and I am pretty sure employees couldn’t guess anyways.

Now, the store next door to us got robbed one day, and a nice police detective came in and asked us to review our security footage to see if we could gain any new information on the suspect. My manager wasn’t in, so I asked for his card and an estimated time for us to review the feed. He gave it to me and I passed the information along.

A week later he came into the store and bought some candy for his son as a weekend treat, and I asked him if they ever found the guy. They didn’t, and that’s too bad. I don’t know why, but when I rang up the officer’s candy purchase, he told me to keep the change as a tip. It was fifty cents.

There are a few things I could do with fifty cents, namely putting it in my change bank at home, or buy a couple sticks of gum. But, I dunno. I didn’t.

What I did do is pull up the formula for a cone on my phone and contemplate the best manner to figure out how many beans were in that martini glass.

The volume of a martini glass may be found as follows: V = π (r² )(h/3)

There are some days when I am glad that I paid attention in school. This is one of them. So, I took that little formula and counted the diameter of the beans across the top of the martini glass, halved it, and then multiplied it by itself. I wrote the number down. Then I counted the number of jellybeans going up the side and divided that number by three and wrote it down. I took those two numbers and multiplied them by each other and then multiplied them by 3.14 to get the total number of jellybeans according to the best of what math could tell me.

That fifty cent tip was entered into the fifty for fifty jelly bean guessing contest under the detective’s name and phone number found from his dropped off business card. And last week the contest ended while I was on vacation.

Guess who my boss told me won the contest when I came back? A very surprised police detective, that’s who. I hear he came in and spent that gift certificate on his son’s birthday present. Now, it doesn’t always pay right off to be nice and tip people, but in this case it did. And I personally can’t think of a sweeter reward for showing kindness to our fellow human beings. It also shows how paying attention in math class really pays off.