Anyone else have one? I happily appreciate anyone else who can contribute one. If not, I’m sure I can find one at some point. I may have one planned, but I have to look. I keep a document with them.
Please, offer one, though.
I have one that I came up with, but I haven’t had a chance to play test it yet. If it’s too easy, please don’t just jump in with the answer. I’ll post answers when I can, but I do try not to log in during the day at work.
**The office where I work has an old, 1970s pinball machine. It’s a company of engineers, so we have as much fun fixing it as playing it.
The score is displayed on reels like the odometer of an old car. There are five digits, so when the score reaches 100,000 it rolls over to 0. One day I noticed that the middle digit wasn’t turning. When I took the cover off the back of the machine, I found there were only four reels. Which one of the four do I have to fix, and how do you know?**
Does the ones digit stay on zero all the time?
Would it be second from left?
I’m not following… If there are only four reels, then of course one of the digits never changes, because it’s not on a reel, and you don’t need to fix anything, because that digit is working as designed.
I have no idea, but I have heard something very much like this before. No idea on the solution, though.
Yes.
If looking at them from the back of the machine (having taken the cover off), yes.
One of the reels should be turning, but isn’t.
What actually happened was this, when you press the button to start a new game, the score should reset to 00000. But it wasn’t; the middle digit was stuck on 3 and wouldn’t turn back to 0. That definitely shouldn’t happen.
I PMed it to you a few weeks ago to get your opinion.
I have, since then, sent it to Futility Closet. Don’t know if they’ll use it or not.
So, did we answer it?
I wasn’t sure if it was answered. Seems like it maybe?
Well, if the other one is not solved, we can put this one on the back burner. However, I will put mine forward now. This one is very fresh, just heard it on the internet. So, as always, no googling!
**When I was a freshmen in high school, all the sophomores, juniors, and seniors had the same running joke, which was that they pretty much all claimed that they were conceived on a Thursday. Almost none of my freshmen class made the same joke and none of the kids in grades below ours made the same joke. What was it about the older grades that made this joke make sense, but not for us?
**
Paintcharge pretty much got it on the first question. Every scoring target on this pinball machine is a multiple of 10 points; 10, 50, 100, 250, etc. Because the last digit of the score will always be 0, the manufacturer didn’t bother to put a working reel in that place; just a portion of one with the 0 fixed in place. From the front, it looks the same as the others, but when I took the cover off the back of the machine there were only four reels where I expected five.
I thought this group might get it too quickly. I’m hoping that Doug (at Futility Closet) doesn’t have an engineering background and it might be a bit more challenging.
Well, I used to play pinball before it faded away for video games, so I knew the ones digit always stayed at 0.
Mahaloth:
Does the joke only work for a certain year?
Any year?
Were you qualified to make the same joke when you became a sophomore?
Does “conceived” mean when the daddy sperm fertilized the mommy ova?
kk
Could the joke have been relevant to sophmores, juniors and seniors at any other school?
Did the joke have to do with a teacher?
Was part of the joke an implied shared ancestry among the upperclassmen?
Would Thursdays at all points during the year be equally amenable to the joke?
Would the joke have worked with some other day of the week instead?
Is this related to any superstition/tradition about children conceived on different days (something like the “Wednesday’s child is full of woe” thing)?
Oh, and thought of another one:
Would the students’ fathers (or at least a large percentage of them) be subject to some obligation which kept them away from home, but which would end in time for a Thursday homecoming?
I’m imagining military terms of service all ending on a Thursday, and those years corresponding to a war winding down.
**When I was a freshmen in high school, all the sophomores, juniors, and seniors had the same running joke, which was that they pretty much all claimed that they were conceived on a Thursday. Almost none of my freshmen class made the same joke and none of the kids in grades below ours made the same joke. What was it about the older grades that made this joke make sense, but not for us?
**
All great questions, just no major “hit” yet. This one is pretty solvable I bet.
I should point out that I did this first-person, but it is not actually me. I just decided not to make someone up for this one.
Is the day of the week related to something that was on TV or other event that took place regularly on Thursday evenings? And resulted in parents having sex afterwards (or during)?