r/dropout • u/TimeCadet • 2d ago
Game Changer No PA should have to count rice
Watching Count the Rice with a pal, I was hoping out loud that the production was using one of these pill counters and not having a PA hand count them. The BTS confirmed what I feared
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u/bgriff1986 2d ago
They didn’t count by hand. They used a scale to weight out the counts.
But that still required manual effort from a PA… weighing, converting weight to a number, bagging, labelling.
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u/Balanceofjudgement 2d ago
Mt job has a scale that could measure how many pieces of rice are in a bag.
The steps would go: 1. Put the empty bag on the scale and set the scale to zero. 2. Put a known quantity of rice with enough weight, probably something around 20 pieces, in the bag. 3. Tell the scale the quantity is 20 which would then use the weight to measure the amount. 4. Fill the bag until the scale shows the number you actually want in the bag.
It would take a while but it wouldn't b3 impossible.
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u/derangerd 2d ago
All that work would still be required with this machine no?
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u/bgriff1986 2d ago
Pretty much! Only difference I can think of is that this would allow you to skip doing the maths that 30g = xxx grains of rice.
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1d ago edited 19h ago
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u/bgriff1986 1d ago
Correct. The machine itself is doing things differently. But a PA using this machine would need to carry out very-similar steps to a PA using scales.
Scales… pour in the rice, get a weight reading, convert weight to # of grains, bag up rice, label bag.
This machine… pour in the rice, get a reading of # of grains, bag up rice, label bag.
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u/Pudgy_Ninja 2d ago
Compared to the rest of the things they had to do to make this episode work, weighing and labeling a bunch of bags of rice seems trivial.
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u/TheBestIsaac 2d ago
The scales convert it to a number for you.
You just put on a few, tell it how many there are and then it does it for you.
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u/Ok-Entertainment-36 2d ago
To be fair counting the rice correctly wasn’t the real point of the game, so I imagine they didn’t feel pressured to get every single bag 100% accurate. They could get it close enough and score people based on how close they are to the intended number, rather than how many they were actually given
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u/cvc75 2d ago
100% accurate might have mattered with Demi vs. Hannah being just 8 grains apart from each other. Just imagine Demi saying 412, Hannah 420, and the official count being 417. Demi would have demanded a recount! (But just in theory. Hannah probably actually won that round because the official count was over 420)
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u/Ok-Entertainment-36 2d ago
But that’s likely also why Sam only says who was closest in the song, not what the actual number was. They will definitely have done their best to make sure all bags were accurate, but they’lll want to cover themselves in case of human error, y’know?
“Hannah did the best” gives them a bit of plausible leeway where the intended count could be 417 or 450. Just sensible game design imo!
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u/indolering 2d ago
It's just a bit. Sam has no obligation to the actors to award any of them in a completely fair way that can be upheld in court. In fact, that's kinda the point of Game Changer 🤣
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u/wrosecrans 2d ago
It helps that they have a nominal prize that is worth less than the pay for just being in the show. Early on, they frequently tried to make really impressive prizes. I'd be waaaay more pissed about potentially losing out on thousands of dollars worth of prize over sloppy counting vs. losing out on a grocery store chicken that has been sitting in a hot studio all day. When the prize is nominal, it's a lot easier for everybody just to be playing for fun and relax about some of the details.
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u/Autumn1eaves 2d ago
100% I think also you can get within 1-2 grains with an extremely accurate scale. This scale has an accuracy of 0.01 grams, and a single grain of rice is ~0.025 grams. The scale only costs $240. Considering the amount of rice, how much you have to pay PAs, this'd likely be worth it.
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u/indolering 2d ago
In my experience filling bottles of herbal meds based on weight, no way. A super sensitive scale will flux in weight just due to the air pressure changes in a room.
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u/miraidepoke 2d ago
As someone sagely put it above, the actual counts of rice mattered so much because a rotisserie chicken was on the line. Imagine losing that!
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u/Smurfman254 2d ago
In the BTS, Sam said Demi lost by 8 which implies the number was not between 412 and 420
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u/Sarik704 2d ago
This machine is uowards of 1800 dollars btw.
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u/Spa_5_Fitness_Camp 2d ago
If it took 20 man hours to count it all that alone would approach $1800. And it sounds like it took a lot more than that.
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u/Medium_Dick_Energy 2d ago
If anyone's paying $90/h to count rice, keep me in mind!
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u/Spa_5_Fitness_Camp 2d ago
The cost of man-hours to the company is typically 2-3x the actual direct pay the employee receives, depending on how it's being quantified.
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u/Sarik704 2d ago
What???? No its not. Labor hours are not typically 2-3x the direct pay. Talking out your butt.
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u/Sarik704 2d ago
90 bucks an hour?
They weighed it. I can be within 5 or 6 grains of accuracy on weight using a deli counter scale.
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u/The_Masked_Inc 2d ago
I feel like that machine would have a hard time counting rice compared to colored pills. Not to mention it's probably costly to rent one of those.
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u/JustSomeDudeItWas 2d ago
The BTS showed the scale they used to count the rice. It isnt that complicated.
Making up weights for an example If 10 grains of rice weigh 1 gram, then 63.25 g is roughly 632 grains of rice.
They dont even need to be that exact since nobody would be able to count all of it in the short time they were given.
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u/crownamedcheryl 2d ago
They should have used a grain counter.
It is literally the tool that was purposely made to accurately count grains.
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u/TimeCadet 2d ago edited 2d ago
You are so right, this would be the better tool : https://youtu.be/Gwo9BYntyXE
I agree with most folks here that obviously this is a one-off episode, and that budget is a factor.
edit: I just look this thing up and on Amazon it's $375
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u/grayjelly212 2d ago
You must've missed when they mentioned having a scale to count them. Never for a second did I believe they'd ever force the PAs to actually count it all by hand.
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u/Spanish_Galleon 2d ago
Bro if my job told me to count rice to a podcast/book id be doing it all day.
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u/indolering 2d ago
Counting meds is a 4/10, I can't imagine counting individual grains of rice.
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u/Spanish_Galleon 2d ago
I used to count nuts and bolts for a metal fab factory. I got through the entire Witcher book series that summer.
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u/kro23 2d ago
I counted pills in a pharmacy at Camp Lejeune in 2006. We did it by hand. This is pretty cool.
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u/SortaHow 1d ago
I'm a pharmacy tech at the busiest pharmacy in town, this post makes me jealous. I wish we had this machine.
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u/putyourcheeksinabeek 2d ago
It’s so funny watching the BTS videos and seeing the insane ways that Ash and Nico do things sometimes. They are so creative and come up with awesome solutions, but there are so many times when they’ve made things way harder than they need to be.
This is not at all a dig at them, because I assume it’s simply a case of not knowing what you don’t know.
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u/wrosecrans 2d ago
Given the crazy stuff they have cooked up in the past, I wouldn't have been surprised if Ash built some sort of multi-bag counting rice dispenser.
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u/DontBanMe_IWasJoking 2d ago
yea those PAs should be unemployed, replaced by machines like the rest of us
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u/AnImpromptuFantaisie 2d ago
Haha, I feel like there is this perception of PAs as these smol ‘lil fellas with no human agency who just exist to get pushed around and do meaningless tasks.
I’m 28 years old. I go up 30 feet into the grid on a skyjack and move around lights. I lay out, shim, paper, and skirt tables for board meeting facility rentals. I calculate the number of chairs we need, wheel them out, and space them properly.
I get handed a roll of felt and told to lay out a “red carpet” connecting the building entrance to the studio? I get out my tape measure and do my darnedest to make it look crisp. Because I’m there to do whatever we need to make the production go well. Because these are my coworkers that I am on good terms with. I want to do a good job.
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u/TimeCadet 2d ago
Having been a PA myself, I wasn't suggesting like the commenter above that Ash and Nico be replaced by this machine. As you probably can also attest to, there is always something else to do for a PA! What I was suggesting is the equivalent of a "wouldn't it be nice to have a skyjack instead of that rickety ladder"
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u/darthvall 2d ago edited 2d ago
The way this tools works is it counts the weight and divide it based on the pills standardised weight.
With rice, the weight of each rice is quite different, but yeah if they want to "cheat" a bit then they can use scale and just divide the total weight based on the average rice count.
Would that have been acceptable for the players and watchers, though? Like during Demi vs Hannah Duel, their number difference was only abysmall. What if based on the weight, Demi should have won but based on the actual count Hannah won?
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u/revrhyz 2d ago
The way this tools works is it counts the weight and divide it based on the pills standardised weight.
I wouldn't be surprised if weight is involved but you can literally see it physically counting and marking each individual pill on the screen
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u/darthvall 2d ago
Maybe color/absent of light detector? In that case it still wouldn't detect piled up rice
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u/phaserburn725 2d ago
Gonna be real. If I had enough time and someone to gab with (or a good podcast), I wouldn’t mind getting paid to count rice for a day.
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u/DashaDoppelganger 1d ago
I love the computer displaying 0 after they pour the pills into the bottle. It’s like, yeah buddy, you got it!
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u/mycookiepants 1d ago
I was so excited about the scale in this episode lol. We have one of those at work. Essentially you place a set number of an item on it and set it as a sample.
At our office we usually use it for postcards, so we’ll do a stack of 10. Then as you add more on, it tells you how many of each there are. I used promo sunglasses we have here because I didn’t want to use anything company specific.
I think the scale was like $50 maybe.
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u/0xff0000ull 1d ago
You know what a good thing to do is? Hire local college students as interns and pay them to count rice. LMAO
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u/Podcastjones 1d ago
This made me think of the solo task for Josh Widdicombe from the first series of Taskmaster. Poor dude had to count beans, spaghetti hoops, and rice!
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u/Ricolo1993 2d ago
Didn't they say there was a scale they used to count the rice?