No, this thread is not waht you think so CALM DOWN.
My boss just pulled me away from my desk demanding that I solve this riddle for her. I tried to explain that the version she has is the distorted one, that the answer is “the” or “three” or whatever the third word in the riddle is and she got mad at me. She started working her way through dictionary.com or someplace and then I Googled some site that explained it but she’s still pissed. Jeez! She comes to get me because she thinks I’m smart enough to solve it, then when I’m actually smart enough to solve it she gets hinky about it.
My cubemates have started referring to me as “Ask Michelle.com” because I always seem to have an answer for them or I can find something on line almost immediately. Of course, I’m spoiling them, making them lazy. At least they recognize my superiority.
I am known as “The Debunker” amongst two different groups of friends. I suspect that is the same for most regulars on this Board. It gets a little old. I won’t let any friends or family waste my time with this stuff anymore unless they swear that they’ve already checked Snopes.
Damn, I wish I got half the credit that you people in this thread seem to get. Most of my friends and cow-orkers want to believe UL/Chain letter/-gry type stuff. I got verbally attacked just the other day for trying to tell some friends that no one has ever produced a picture of those “DEA” signs.
I thought we were doing The Fugitive. The Harrison Ford movie. One of Tommy Lee Jones’ guys says ‘Hinky’ and Jones is like ‘Hinky!?! What the hell is hinky?’
I WISH my friends and family would ask me “is this true” before sending me free Applebee’s gift cards or trips to Disneyland. But they don’t! And I feel bad for electornically yelling at my folks, but I do it because everytime I get one I get madder and madder!
Not sure what you mean by this. There are a number of sources indicating that this is a reasonable solution, for example, this one. If this solution is wrong, what do you propose as an alternative?
As I was wondering about responses to this thread this morning, I realized that this is actually the second time in as many weeks that I’ve been called upon to solve one of these legendary puzzles. Last week some cow-orkers ordered Chinese food and had to figure out how to distribute change from a $20, and it ended up playing out almost exactly like that “missing dollar” riddle that we all also love so much.
All these purported “solutions” involving “Oh, yeah, the original version was worded differently” started appearing some years after the question started showing up. No one has as yet shown any “old” version to support the belief that it was supposed to be a trick question. I’m not saying that that’s not the case–only that it has not been proved. And there are at least the different alleged “orginal wordings.”
