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In highschool I worked a shitty job at a butchery, and one day the boss decided to "test how smart" I was or something by asking me to get him 1000 wooden skewers out of the box.
Being an attention to detail kind of person, I spent a few minutes counting out 1000 cos I wanted to make sure I gave him exactly what he asked for - wouldn't want a customer to order 1000 and get 995 or something cos I miscounted right?
Apparently not, cos that was the dumb way to do it - boss slapped 10 skewers on the scale then weighed out 100x that and was really proud until I pointed out that the certificate of accuracy only guaranteed the scale to +/- 2 skewers, then apparently I'm a "smart ass". Can't win with some people
I've definitely counted paper the same way. Basically needed to sort short pieces of paper by the thousands. We weighed something like 20-25 sheets then used that weight as a measurement.
If you need a perfect count, then you're correct about the accuracy, but generally a few off here and there isn't that big a deal. Many companies will allow for some error because it isn't worth the time to track it down to perfection. This applies even to food standards: the FDA allows up to 60 insect parts per 100g of chocolate (coffee, the cutoff is "Average 10% or more by count are insect-infested or insect-damaged"). They also allow mold up to a certain %. 4% for coffee, and I'm seeing some say 10% for certain fruits. You can see lists here: https://www.fda.gov/food/current-good-manufacturing-practices-cgmps-food-and-dietary-supplements/food-defect-levels-handbook
Perfection is expensive, cheat a little. Your boss may have been annoying, but in general he's more correct than you were.
Personally, if I'd paid $1500 for 1000 of something and got any less than 1000 units I'd be kinda pissed
Sure, but a big business doing large volume would care less. They generally already order with the built in assumption that even if the amount is correct, not every single one would be usable. At certain costs/products this may require accurate counts (like say docking stations) but with other certain things, including some foodstuffs and of course much cheaper supplies (like say disposable straws or chopsticks) they wouldn't even bother to count to make sure they got 10000 straws this order instead of 9995 straws. The amount of money paying someone to coun that to be sure would be more than the missing straws worth, unless you suspected your supplier was shorting you on purpose.
If you need more specifics, then generally the smart thing to do is find a machine that already counts more accurately than a human, like change/bill counters, or other counting machines. Generally isn't worth it to have any employee count large numbers regularly.
Thats the another huge advantage of the DIN formats, its very easy to calculate the weight if you know the grammage of the paper.
DIN A0 = 1m^2 If the paper has a grammage of 80gr/m^2, that means that one sheet of
- DIN A1 weighs 40gr
- DIN A2 weighs 20gr
- DIN A3 weighs 10gr
- DIN A4 weighs 5gr
That makes it really simple to calculate postage without weiging it.
When we are printing stuff in bulk you can also use a scale to measure the number of pages without counting and it usually has a very small margin of error (good enough for distributing flyers and stuff)
Having worked many years in a warehouse, including picking, putting away, and inventorying tiny parts, I can assure you of one thing. The relevancy of the scale's accuracy is inversely proportionate to how long you've been working there.
The correct response when someone calls you a smartass is "It's better than being a dumbass"