Hey everybody, welcome to another phrasal verb episode.
I hope that you've enjoyed these phrasal verb episodes so far.
Today, we're gonna look at the phrasal verb add up.
And you might have noticed by now that I'm kind of going in alphabetical order here.
So we're doing a lot of phrasal verbs that start with A.
I don't know if i'll continue doing this in alphabetical order, but for now that's what i'm gonna do.
So we're gonna look at the phrasal verb add up today, and we're gonna look at three different usages of this phrasal verb.
So the first usage of add up that i want to mention is we can use this to talk about something increasing in amount.
So for example, we might say, owning a house has been more expensive than I thought.
There are a lot of hidden costs that add up.
We like to use this when talking about costs or maybe some negative thing that it accumulates and ends up really increasing in its total amount.
So in this case, there are a lot of hidden costs that add up.
Another usage that we're going to look at is that we use add up to talk about adding two or more numbers together to get the total.
So this one is a pretty straightforward usage.
For example, we might say, add those numbers up to figure out the total.
So here we're just saying that we're adding the numbers together and seeing what the result is, what the total is.
So we can use it in that situation as well.
And one other meaning of add up can be when a story or an explanation makes sense and is consistent.
And usually we use this in the negative in this context.
Listen to this example.
The police felt that his story didn't quite add up.
What I'm saying here is that the police felt that the man's story didn't really make sense or it wasn't really consistent.
It sounds like he might be lying or he might not be telling the whole truth.
His story isn't adding up.
So that's another meaning of add up.
So now I wanna talk about my time working as a cashier at the dining hall of my university.
The dining hall is where students go to eat.
So this is actually a real position that I had for a time.
And I'll talk a little bit about that.
But I'll also add a little bit of fiction to this story of my time there.
And I'm going to include the phrasal verb add up and its different meanings as I talk about this.
OK, so when I worked as cashier at this dining hall, that was actually my first experience doing something like that.
I had worked as a cook before cooking food.
I had made sandwiches before working at a deli, but I had never been a cashier before the person working at the cash register.
And, to be honest, I didn't really have to do that that much adding and subtracting with money, because when students would come in to this dining hall, normally they had these cards that I would scan because they had already purchased a meal plan.
Like maybe they were allowed to have five meals a week or something like that.
So I would just swipe their card or scan their card and then they would go through.
However, there were some students that didn't have a meal plan there.
So they would just pay to come in for that one day.
So I had to charge them for that one day.
So in those cases I actually had to collect money from them, put it in the cash register, and there were times when people were suspected of stealing.
Not me but other cashiers who worked other shifts.
Right, because there was the opportunity to steal, because you're collecting money and you're dealing with that money, it's in your hands.
And there was the opportunity to put some in your back pocket.
Right, not good, but the opportunity was there.
So at the end of the day, the manager had to add up all the money.
So they had to look in the register, count the money.
They added it all up and there would be times when something seemed off.
Something didn't quite add up because the manager would ask Add the money up again and again.
And the total didn't match the number of day passes that were sold.
So it seemed like something went wrong or money was missing, perhaps.
And...
There were times when the cashier's story didn't add up when the manager questioned him or her.
And they would say that, oh, there were fewer customers than what this computer is saying.
I don't know why it's saying there were 10 day passes.
There were only eight.
That type of story never really added up, because why would the computer say that there were 10 day passes, but there's only money for the equivalent of 8 day passes in the register?
Something's missing there.
Either the computer is lying or the cashier is lying.
And in that case, of course, the manager would be suspicious of the cashier.
So me, for example...
I never wanted my manager to think that I was stealing because I never stole, obviously.
But if I didn't count the money right or if I didn't give the customer the correct change, there might be a problem with the amount of money stolen that I collected as well.
So I would always add up the money in the register and I would add it up again and again just to make sure that it matched what the computer said.
If the computer said that there needed to be 50 in the register because that was how many day passes were sold, then I needed to make sure that all the dollars in the register added up to that total.
So I was very diligent with this.
I never wanted to be accused of stealing, but I'm sure that there were some other cashiers that might have had bad intentions about And they might not have had the most integrity and they might have stolen from the register.
I don't know how common this is, but I know that the temptation can be there for some people.
So that's something I remember from my time working as the cashier at that dining hall.
And there were other things that people would do besides just possibly stealing.
That were not good things.
One thing that I remember very well is that people would take these short breaks while they were on the job and They would stop working for five minutes or so so that they could check their phone or talk to their friends or whatever, and they might not have thought that that was a big deal.
However, taking these short breaks while on the job really do add up and they can have a big impact on the overall performance of that employee.
Maybe one five-minute break might not hurt or it might not have a big negative effect, but once you take three or four or five short breaks when you're not supposed to, Those really add up and they actually do have a big negative impact on the overall work of that day.
There were times when I had co-workers who couldn't seem to do everything right that they needed to do for that shift and at first i wondered why that was.
But then, after working with them for a few weeks, i could see that all of their slacking when you slack, this means that you don't do what you're supposed to do, you're kind of being lazy All of their slacking and their short breaks that they were taking were really adding up and having a negative impact on our work.
And another thing that would add up and create kind of a bigger issue was the amount of food that was wasted.
I also worked with food at that dining hall.
And food gets wasted in that environment.
That's true.
However, sometimes an excessive amount of food gets wasted and people really aren't careful with how much food they're throwing away.
That food really adds up.
The amount of food that you're throwing away adds up and, at the end of the day, the amount of food that you've thrown away might be the equivalent of.
10 full meals that someone could have eaten, right?
So it's not good to waste so much food.
Those little amounts really add up and you end up wasting a lot more than you're really thinking.
So when you're working in that type of environment at a restaurant or, in my case, at a dining hall then you have to watch out for that.
Because little things like that, okay, I need to throw this away because I didn't make it right.
I need to throw that food away because...
It's a little undercooked.
That happens, but it's important to see how that adds up.
And at the end of the day, you might be wasting tons of food without really realizing it.
And there was a time when one employee was confronted about how much food they were wasting because they kept needing to throw food away because they didn't cook it correctly or whatever.
And one day the manager added up all the slices of bread that he could find in the trash can, this food station in the dining hall.
He added up all the different slices of bread that were in the trash can after the shift, and it really was a lot of bread.
And not only that, but the manager also checked the bags of bread that were empty and something didn't really add up because yes, the person was wasting a lot of bread, but it also seemed like there was even more bread missing.
There was more bread being used than what was normal, even counting all of the waste.
And it turns out that the person was also stealing bread and taking it back to his dorm.
And the manager was able to figure this out because that employee's story did not add up at all when they gave an explanation for why they had used so much bread.
I think that that employee wasn't really prepared to get questioned about that.
They weren't expecting the manager to add up all the pieces of bread that were in the trash can and then add that to the number of sandwiches that were sold that day, and then to look at the empty bags of bread and And that employee wasn't expecting the manager to add all that up.
And so when he was questioned about it, about why there was so much bread missing, his story didn't add up at all.
It seemed like he was making everything up in the moment and just trying to think of different excuses.
And it was clear his story didn't add up.
And the manager was finally able to get him to admit that he was stealing bread and he was taking it home with him.
He was taking it back to his dorm room.
So, of course, he got in trouble for that.
And that was something he wasn't supposed to be doing, obviously.
So you can see that in this type of work environment there are many employees that might not do their best work or might do things that they shouldn't do or steal.
And of course, these little things do add up and they affect a company.
They affect its overall performance performance.
So these are things that managers are constantly trying to prevent and make sure that they don't happen.
And so that was a little bit about my time working at my university dining hall.
And I hope that those different usages of add up were very clear for you and that you were able to hear them in different contexts and that you can Remember these different meanings of the phrasal verb add up.
So I hope you enjoyed this phrasal verb episode.
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All right.
Thank you for listening to this phrasal verb episode, and I'll talk to you in the next one.
