That was my response to a middle-school girl (my peer at the time) trying out an extremely rudimentary strategy of “playing dumb” to look cute (“how do you draw a ‘3’ again? Tee-hee!”). Of course, what I told her was complete nonsense.
“So…a woman named At?”
“No. A woman named Pat. You have to think of Pat first, then take away the ‘P’ and see how she looks. She’d look like a ‘3’”.
There’s nothing to explain. It just superficially sounds like a genuine puzzler but it’s not. It’s completely meaningless and I made it up on the spot. I just thought it was funny that she took it seriously enough to actually think about it.
It makes perfect sense to me. All you have to do is take the P out of PAT like you said. You are left with “AT”. Now, what company does that refer to? Most people would say AT&T. What stock price is AT&T currently trading “AT”? $38.76. Notice the first digit. That is how you draw a three.
Am I the only one that reads the stock section in the paper these day? I weep for our youth.