Who else has ever done a "Sherlock Holmes" inference in real life?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m a huge fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories, having read and re-read all of Doyle’s work on the great detective many times since I discovered them when I was 11 or 12 years old. I’m currently re-reading “The Sign of Four” which I downloaded as a free eBook on my iPhone while on the subway coming in to work today (I love that thing), and it reminded me of one time fifteen years ago when I rather dramatically succeeded at pulling off a Holmesian act myself.

A friend of mine had gotten an amazing price on a pair of round trip tickets to Mumbai, India – about 20% cheaper than the best price he could find through any other travel agent. (This was in 1993, just before anything like Expedia, Travelocity or Priceline existed.) He’d gotten the deal through an advertisement in an Indian community circular in North/Central NJ, and had had to give half of the full airfare amount as a deposit. But here he was, less than a week before the flight, and he had still not received the tickets. Repeated phone calls to the agent got the usual response of “it’ll be in the mail any time now”. He began to feel like he was getting scammed, especially when he looked the agency up and it had an address in Brooklyn, NY (“Crooklyn”), far from the usual circulating area of NJ of the paper he’d seen the advertisement in. He decided to confront the travel agent personally, and asked me to come along as a backup and eyewitness.

We went into Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, at got there around 3pm. The “travel agency” was just a single, nearly empty room on the second floor of a walkup apartment building. In it was a fax machine, a single small office table with a phone and the usual inbox/outbox type of paper tray, a garbage can, and a couple of travel posters taped up on the walls. That’s it.

There was a young man sitting there answering the phone, who said he was a student who worked there part time until “the boss” got in around 4pm. The agency was apparently a solo operation, though legit enough to have an actual office, phone, part-time receptionist and all that.

When the agent arrived, he recognized my friend’s voice and name and began saying how his tickets were “on their way” and how he’d call him right away as soon as they got in. Then he asked who I was and what I was doing there, and my friend said, “He’s a friend of mine who wanted to come see your operation with me.”

I’m Asian, and at the time was 22 years old, stood at 6’2" and 200 lbs., and wearing dark sunglasses. I grinned, shook his hand with a firm grip, and then said my first words to him: “Hi, I’m <robardin>. How’s your son doing?”

He looked at me in surprise. “My son?”
“Yes. You have a son, don’t you? About three, maybe four years old?”
“Er… Yes, he’s four. How did you know?”
“I just figured, that’s all. Anyway, we’re here about my friend’s airplane tickets.”

He looked a little rattled. I think he may have thought I was making some kind of veiled threat. We left without the tickets (he didn’t have them in the office), but the very next day, they arrived via next day FedEx to my friend.

My friend asked me after we left where that had come from.

“Well you see, we had 45 minutes sitting around a mostly empty office, so I used that time to look around the place.”
“Yes, but that office was pretty bare! And the desk didn’t have any pictures on it. How did you know about his son?”

I took a pull on my imaginary pipe, and gave my analysis: "I noticed that the wall near the window facing the street, and even the windowsill a little bit, had a little trail of red ink RECEIVED stamp prints. The room had been recently painted, it even still smelled a bit of paint, so the stamps must have been very recently done. While I didn’t see the stamp on the desk, I did see mail in the inbox tray stamped with the same stamp I saw on the wall and windowsill.
"I didn’t imagine it was that college student receptionist who took it into his head to idly stamp the wall and windowsill… But it would be just the sort of thing a child would do.
“Assuming the markings on the wall were made at about eye level, which is usually the case, the child stood at about the height of a 3-4 year old. And what child would have the run of a newly occupied office, to the point of not one, but a little trail of stamps? Only the boss’ child. I guessed it was a boy because a father, especially (if you’ll excuse the stereotype) an Indian man, could well be more indulgent, even encouraging of such mischievous tendencies in a son than a daughter.”

“Brilliant!”

That’s one of my favorite memories!

2

Not yet, but we’re trying to do one on our neighbors.

They’re a bunch of buttheads and there’s been some sort of domestic brouhaha going on over there for the past several months. The chief butthead seems to be on the verge of being kicked out by the lesser buttheads, but keeps returning sporadically, sometimes driving his own car, sometimes driving unfamiliar cars. Meanwhile, folks who still live there seem to move out for a week or two and then move back in. New visitors come and go. Mysterious banging and running and yelling take place at all hours (we share a wall, unfortunately).

Mr. brown tried guessing several scenarios that may or may not be occurring next door, but no one scenario seems fit all the facts.

I said, “By Jove, Holmes, this one has stumped even you.”

He said, “You are to consider, Watson, that the people under surveillance are a bunch of dumbshits, and therefore the application of logic to solving this puzzle is completely meaningless.”

3

I was listening to the radio (NPR) at work recently and they had a story about a news conference that Mayor Bloomburg of New York called to announce that they had solved “The Case of Mysterious Maple Syrup Smell”. The story led off by explaining that in the past few months (weeks? I don’t remember now) New Yorkers had contacting City Hall to complain of a mysterious maple syrup smell. It appeared sporadically and in different locations in the city. None of the people who called in were able to trace the smell to its source. Bloomburg informed reporters that by analyzing the locations of the reported smell and the direction of the prevailing winds at the time of the calls, they were able to determine where the smell came from.

Just from hearing “Mysterious Maple Syrup Smell” I was virtually certain that it came from processing fenugreek. When I heard the details that it was reported in several different locations and that no one was able to trace it by following their nose, my hypothesis was that it was from a factory nearby but not actually in New York City.

It turns out that there was a factory in Jew Jersey that sometimes processed fenugreek and the winds occasionally wafted the smell into the city.

4

VERY well done! I have nothing to compete but bravo and applause!!

5

This was not me, but my wife.

My son and a friend had been playing with matches and had started a brush fire that the local fire department had come and extinguished. My wife deduced that he had started a fire. She said that she saw microcues in my son that only a mother would recognize (not Sherlock Holmes). She said he was white as a sheet, smelled of smoke and only had one eyebrow.

6

I’ve done lots of these in my life but unfortunately only a seedier one is coming to mind at the moment.

Several years ago I was standing in my bedroom talking to my mom and suddenly she looked up and behind me and asked, “where is your change jar?” I had a free-standing wardrobe maybe 8 feet tall with a change jar on top that I rarely contributed to anymore, but it contained over $300.

I thought about it for awhile and suddenly it all came to me. A few months earlier, my brother had been home on leave from the USMC, and we had a little get-together of old friends. Two of the guys were apparently pretty bad (worse than I thought, at least) on cocaine, and were only thinly veiling their discussions about how to get some all night. At one point one of them disappears around back for awhile and then comes back and suggests to the other one they go to the store to get cigarettes. :dubious: They clearly didn’t have any money at all, but for some reason the rest of us were having fun and this didn’t send up any red flags. They were gone for quite awhile, and came back happy. The jitters, shifty looks, and whispers were all gone.

The guy who disappeared out back must’ve climbed into my bedroom window and stole my change jar! Ahhh, but how could I prove it?

I thought about this for awhile. What would I do if I were a cokehead and just stole $300 off a guy I’d known almost my whole life - whose mom is friends with my mom, whose brother is my best friend - I’d do what any other cokehead would do, of course. A drug-dealer would tell you to fuck off with a bunch of change, so I’d have to trade it in, but banks aren’t open in the middle of the night. Bingo. I remembered a 24-hour grocery store across town that had one of those change-converters, and knew that was the only place they could’ve gone.

I calculated the date it must’ve happened and headed to the store. I talked to the security there and told them what happened. One of the guys had been working that night and clearly, unambiguously, remembered our villains. They bothered to make up some ridiculous story about cashing their change in to take an impromptu beach trip. Unfortunately, the store wasn’t in the business of storing old tapes of guys ripping their friends off, so they didn’t have the video anymore. What was I to do? Bluff, of course.

I tracked one of the guys down and sat down at a table with him. “You like videos? I just saw a good video. It was YOU cashing in my change jar.” :eek:

Normally, they wouldn’t have paid me back, but they were both on probation and knew they could’ve done time if I had went to the cops. They were so paranoid that they made me give them hand-written receipts after I had been paid in full :D.

7

Nice! And that is funny… “REMITTED: $300 debt stemming from cokehead burglary of old friend. Signed, the old friend.”

8

Beautiful, Cisco!

If I wrote a short story based on this*, the only thing I’d do to improve it would be to have them call your bluff, at which point the narrator would have put some unmarked tape into the closest VCR, only to eject it before the first image played, saying “Fuck it! I’m not giving you anything that would help you in your legal defense. If you want to see it, or discuss this before giving me the 300 dollars, you can do that in court. I’m taking this evidence straight to the cops” and THEN to have them cave.

  • and I just might.
9

Closest was when I first heard the Joy “Born Free” Adamson had been killed by a lion. I read the reports and asked, “Was her neck broken? If not, it wasn’t a lion.”

I’d just read a book discussing a man-eating lion, and it indicated that they always kill their prey first – usually by breaking their neck – before dragging them off to eat.

In any case, it was later reported that she had been murdered.

10

Great stories! I don’t think I can compare, but I had a minor one just the other day.

I was performing an IT security audit of one of the sites belonging to our company. This is in healthcare, and there are locked boxes on the wall outside of each patient room where the staff stores patient charts. The boxes are accessed by punching in a PIN on a number pad at the top of each box.

I strolled casually down the hall until I got to the nurse in charge of the floor.

I asked, “Do you open those chart boxes with a four-digit PIN?” (I guessed about the four-digit thing, but just about every PIN is four-digit).

“Yes,” she said.

“Is the PIN 1111?”

“Um… yeah.”

“You might want to change that.”

OK, it was an easy one. On the keypad for every box, the only key that showed any wear was the “1”. All the 1s were rubbed off, and the other keys looked new.

11

Thank you!

Cool! Send it my way if you do, I’d love to read it.

12

Nice one! Of course for security purposes, every once in a while they reverse the password sequence. :smiley:

13

I sort of did one of these a couple of years ago. I used to play hockey on a recreational league with the spouse, and after a game we came back to the locker room to discover that someone had gotten in and rifled through people’s bags. I never left my wallet in there, but the spouse did and it was stolen. Worse, the thieves had taken our goalie’s car keys and stolen his brand new truck!

So anyway, we got home and I started calling the credit card companies to find out where the cards were used. The thieves had used them at a gas station (probably to fill up the truck!), at a KFC, and at a liquor store. It was late, and the liquor store wasn’t in a very good neighborhood, but I was feeling all sleuthy so I persuaded the spouse to come along. We quizzed the guy there and he remembered the thieves. Even better, he had the charge slip they’d signed (it was amusing–my spouse’s very Anglo name right above a signature that looked like it was made by a crazed Chinese guy, and nothing like his real one)…and he said they had video of the guys! I got a copy of the charge slip and asked him if he minded if I called the police and asked them to come by and chat with him. He said he didn’t. So I went home, called the cops, and filled them in on my detective work.

The thieves were caught shortly after that (I’m sure it wasn’t just my info that did it, but I hope it helped) and they recovered the truck. Of course, it took the goalie’s mom actually spotting the truck being driven in their neighborhood to finally convince the police to do something, but I still felt like I helped in some small way.

14

Not crime-related, and not to the level of significance of the earlier stories, but significant enough to me at the time: I had to pee.

I was at a restaurant and went to find the restrooms. There were two doors, side by side, but the gender-identifying plates were missing for some reason. I looked at both doors for a second, and then pushed open the one on the right. Yep. Urinals. Good, I was in the right place.

The giveaway was the brass push plates on the doors. The brass was shinier on the top half of the plate on the right hand door, and shinier on the bottom half on the door to the left.

15

I was in law school, chatting/flirting with a girl in the law library. She was from a neighboring school. She mentioned she had graduated from a college in her hometown after transferring there her sophomore year.

I asked her when she had gotten divorced. She was astounded that I had deduced she moved back to her hometown to marry her HS sweetheart based solely on the fact of her transfer.

16

I remember when I bought my very first house. The front door led to a hall which Y’d into another hall and the kitchen. For some reason the color of the kitchen was a hideous yellow color. Yea we had painted over that color as quickly as we could. While we were painting, my ex remarked “Why would anyone want to paint a room such an awful color, especially the first room you see when you come in the house?” I said “Why, it’s lemon entry, my dear Watson.”

She wasn’t too amused about that.

17

My wife and I do it all the time at restaurants. We scrutinize the other patrons for any information we can glean. We can tell who is on a first date, who is with someone who is not their spouse, who is married, who is fighting, etc…

Of course, we never find out if we’re right or not, but it’s still fun.

18

You married Emma Watson? NICE! :wink:

19

makes a change from them writing it on the wall, I suppose :rolleyes:

20

I came to this thread late but I don’t think it’s Zombie yet.

I can’t compare with some of these stories, but once when I was in college this girl was frustrated because she didn’t know her mailbox and would have to go all the way back to reception to find it out. I said “this is your mailbox” pointing it out in a row of more than a hundred. She was impressed and a little alarmed.

The mailboxes had little windows on them. If she’d never used hers before it would be the one that was still stuffed with orientation materials.