> On Wed, 27 December 2000, Brian D Williams wrote:
> > Since we were talking about GATTACA I thought I'd
> > share the first lateral thinking puzzle I was ever
> > told:
> > A man hates his job.
> > One day he comes home and begins to drink...
> > He drinks till he passes out.
> > He gets up in the middle of the night, and goes to
> > the bathroom. Then he turns out the light, and goes
> > back to bed.
> > When he wakes up in the morning, he looks out his
> > window and see's hundreds of people laying there
> > dead.
> > The man kills himself.
> > Q. What did the man do for a living?
>
Ziana replied:
> Maybe he was a scientist developing some sort of bio/nano plague (maybe
for the military or something). He drank a bunch because he was depressed
about the people he was working on it for planning to use it, although maybe
like the atomic-bomb research people he was originally interested in doing
the research, but by this point he was against how it would be used but was
in too deep now. And he went into the bathroom in the middle of the night
because he had a dream that he had become infected with the disease, and he
was checking to see if the signs (of whatever form) were showing on him.
Reassured it was just a dream, he returns to bed. But then the next morning
it turns out the plague had been released in some way (either accidentally
or otherwise), and some activists against the research (bio, nano, whatever)
had discovered his role in developing the plague and had brought some of the
bodies of the dead there and piled them where he saw when he looked out of
his window (ei!
> ther hoping to infect him with the disease, or just in a
demonstration/protest sort of way).
>
How about this... he was involved in developing a nano-plague, and was
depressed about it. He came home and got drunk, because of his moral crisis.
This crisis had been going on for some time.
There were various safeguards at the labs. Unfortunately, our hero had been
fairly sloppy recently, due to his generally low moral, and had been
infected with the plague. Fortunately, however, he was also carrying an
internal nano-anti-plague against the nano-plague, as were all the lab's
workers. Unfortunately, the anti-plague just locally neutralised the plague,
rather than eradicating it.
Even more unfortunate, the plague was designed to travel in water, whilst
the anti-plague was designed to stay in a host body and not replicate/travel
outside.
After a period of drunken stupor, our hero wakes up, goes to the bathroom,
does what it is natural for him to do (ie: urinates), flushes the toilet,
turns off the light, goes to bed.
He wake up in the morning to find everyone dead; the entire water/sewage
infrastructure of the area is infested with deadly nano-plague. Presumably
the other guys from the lab are ok, but they're the only ones left. Also
perhaps there is a small subset of the populace with natural resistance to
the plague, who are also left alive.
He kills himself, and the small remainder of humanity goes on to play out
Steven King's The Stand, to everyone's dismay (as it is a hopeless story).
Did I forget to mention that he lives in a lighthouse?
Emlyn
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