Itemized Bill

When I was in high school my father told me about a town in Nebraska that had a sewage treatment plant that wasn't working correctly. None of the people tasked with operating the plant could figure out what was wrong.

Finally in desperation the town called in a consultant in the hopes that he could solve the problem. When the consultant got there, he spent about an hour walking around the sewage treatment plant checking everything out. He then picked up a big hammer from a workbench and walked over to a large steel gate valve. He gave the valve a big whack with the hammer and the plant started working again almost immediately.

A few weeks later the city received a bill from the consultant for $10,000. That was real money back then and the mayor was incensed when he found out. He said, "All the guy did was walk around the plant for an hour and then he whacked one valve with a hammer. Why should we have to pay $10,000 for that? Send that bill back and demand that it be itemized!"

Several weeks later the town received this itemized bill from the consultant:

 

• One whack with a 24 oz. ball peen hammer - $1
• Knowing what to whack - $9,9999

 

The town paid the itemized bill.

Elevator Search

When my friend, Jake, and I finished Officer Candidates School, we both went to Military Intelligence school at Fort Holabird in Baltimore Md. The course lasted 4 months so we rented an apartment on the fourth floor of an older building in downtown Baltimore.

The apartment  had an elevator, but it was an old elevator that didn't have modern buttons to select your floor. It had a nice old elevator operator who would start and stop the elevator manually. The elevator had a big handle which he would push forward to go up and pull back to go down. To stop he would put the handle in its default middle position. There was a lot of lag between where the handle was moved to and how the elevator responded. He rarely ever managed to stop right on the target floor. If he was too high he would go down a bit. If he was too low he would go up.

This back and forth would go on until he got it right or just gave up and said, "Please step up or please step down."  Jake and I would regularly place bets on how many tries it would take for the elevator to stop at our floor.

It was an elevator variation on the binary search.

Skirting the issue

When I worked for Juniper Networks, the office of the founder, Pradeep, was in the same area as our group of engineer's desks. Rafaella, an attractive Italian woman in her early 40's, was his administrative assistant and was very good at her job. She always wore very classy, office appropriate attire and always wore slacks.

One morning I met her in the hall near the breakroom and saw she was wearing a very nice dark gray skirt that went almost to the floor. I said, "Rafaella, what's the special occasion you're wearing that nice ankle-length skirt for?" She said, "When I was in Pradeep's office a couple of days ago he complained about me always wearing slacks. He wanted to know why I never wore skirts. So," she said with a mischievous smirk, "I'm wearing a skirt today."