skryche

Storytime!

One day, in my Driver's Ed class in High School (yeah, this was a while ago) the school's guidance counsellor came to our room to talk about (I think) career choices. They didn't care too much about cutting into Drivers' Ed — they knew we'd all learn to drive.

Anyway, to break the ice (or something), Mr. Sneed (real name) decided to show us a trick that, I guess, he thought was pretty neat-o. He tells the class, "You think of a number between 1 and 100 and I'll bet you five dollars that I can guess what it is after only six guesses. But you have to tell me lower or higher after each one I get wrong."

I don't remember exactly how many guesses he was supposed to get. I say six here; it may well have been seven or eight. Regardless, it's less than one would think, which is supposed to be the neat thing about the trick. Big woop. At first, nobody took him up on the unimpressive offer; obviously, the trick was rigged in his favor. But then: light-bulb. And I volunteered.

So, he instructed me to write the number on a piece of paper, and I did. Nerds in the audience will probably have already guessed the most obvious thing for me to write: "π". (For those of you with limited Unicode support, that's the greek letter pi, a.k.a. ~3.1416.) I showed it to other students, without, of course, letting Mr. Sneed see. The expressions of awed respect on their faces may be a figment of my memory.

So, we played Mr. Sneed's game, and he predictably settled on 4 or 3. When I said "no" to his final guess, he snorted, "No, that's the only thing it could be, you can't change it after you start."

I showed him my paper.

"Whole numbers! Whole numbers!"

"You didn't say 'whole numbers'; you just said 'numbers'."

He refused to pay out. My regret: that I backed down on an issue I was so completely bullet-proofally correct on. Bitch owes me five dollars.