I bought a calculator which gives wrong answers

What are the chances of that? I think I had my first calculator when I was 6 years old. I'm 40 now. That's 34 years of correct calculators . Then along comes some heap of junk from Staples that's made of recycled materials. Yeah I took the "green" option. I give it a simple sum: Twenty divided by three times two. Setting aside any potential debate about operator precedence, any calculator worth its salt is going to give 13.33 as an answer. Mine gives 44.44!
 
And I just know...I just know that when I take this thing back to Staples and try to demonstrate what's wrong with it, the damn thing is going to start working properly. 
 

It's solar powered. Maybe the sun is dead??

How many wavelengths are there?

sharke
How many wavelengths are there?

A lot.

craigb
Ha!  I know what you did!

If you're thinking it somehow squared the 6.66, you're right. But there's no way the above sum would lead to that, even if the multiply button was registering a phantom double click (like my POS Logitech mouses). 
 
To square something, you hit X X =
Even if I was hitting 3 X X 2, it still wouldn't square anything. You have to hit equals directly after the two multiplies. In fact if you hit 3 X X 2 on a calculator, it's just going to give you 6. 

20/3*2= should give 13.3333..
20/3^2= should give 2.22222..
 
The ^ should be evaluated before the / giving 20/3^2 = 20/9 = 2.2222..
your result shows it is also calculating in the wrong order giving this (20/3)^2 = 44.4444..

It's the new math.

Are you sure you don't just have fat fingers??
 
J

Maybe it is a new variant of the HP reverse Polish notation calculator … the ones where you enter the data in a stack and then perform the operation.  It could be utilizing some sort of reverse Coffee House notation where the calculator randomly ascribes different operations to different keys.

An update: I finally took the calculator back to Staples and was able to demonstrate the problem to an initially bemused cashier. She then gave me her own Staples calculator (a different model) to try, and it had the same problem. So then we got 2 more Staples calculators off the shelf and tried those - same problem! I appear to have found a bug which affects the whole range of Staples calculators. I shall email them and let them know...in the meantime however, I bought a little Sharp from Best Buy and it works great.

craigb
I think it's funny that something that's only meant to do ONE thing can't even do that one thing correctly - lol!

Their mistake was in not hiring me as a beta tester.