686 Back to the Museum

I went to the Maritime Museum this afternoon for my weekly volunteer stint. The coordinator had called me the other day and asked if I could make up some notebooks for them with information about other touristy stuff in the Rondout, because visitors are always asking, so I was supposed to just pick up a list of places today, and then do the research at home. But when I got there, the woman who was supposed to be in the gift shop hadn't come in, so I ended up running the shop.

The cash register is all fancy and computerized. There's an instruction sheet someone had written up, and I figured that out ok, but something struck me as odd. Sales tax on the t-shirts is 4%, and tax on other items is 8%, no tax on museum admission or memberships. But --- when you sell something taxable, there's just one button you push, and "it adds the tax on". How does it know whether it's a t-shirt or not? When my relief arrived, I asked her, and she said no one had reprogrammed the register when the clothing tax was lowered, so it still charges 8% for everything.

Um, is that legal?

Update on the ice boats I mentioned in an earlier entry - the "Icicle", once owned by the Roosevelts, is on display inside. It's LONG! Much longer than the one they had outside last week. The film about the Hudson River that they run constantly in the theater does say that it had been clocked at 100 mph. So Russ was right.