Friday, March 30, 2007

Needle. Haystack. Go figure.

Back in October, Intelinurse at It's a nursing thing, posted about weird interview questions. The first bit is the quote from her blog. It's followed by my response which I posted in the comments.

Weirdest Questions

They asked me to tell them about myself. Then as each took turns asking me questions, things got strange. One guy asked me to
name 10 ways to find a needle in a haystack. Another wanted to know how many gallons of water it took to put out an average house fire. What almost put me over the edge was when one of them asked me how many things I could do with a marshmallow. I couldn't tell her what I was actually thinking!

10 ways to find a needle in a haystack

1. Move every stalk individually and build a new haystack exactly six feet from the original. At some point, you'll encounter the needle.
2. Throw the haystack into a swimming pool. Add detergent to break surface tension. Straw floats, needle sinks.
3. Take haystack to scrapyard. Use industrial strength electromagnet to retrieve needle.
4. Bribe your children with a reward for the needle. Remuneration should reflect how badly you want the damned thing.
5. If you know who was injected with the needle, genetically splice their DNA with a glowworm's DNA and Staphylococcus Aureus. Grow in culture. Spray on haystack. Genetically modified bacteria will latch onto remnants of human biological material and glow in the dark, or in UV light.
6. Send haystack to the X-ray department for an X-ray,
7. Ultrasound,
8. MRI scan. If you hear a 'tink', that's the needle hitting the magnets (see 3.)
9. Bleep the Hospital chaplain. E-mail Bill Gates asking for his assistance. Borrow camel from zoo.Have chaplain preach to Bill Gates. It should then be easy for the camel to locate the eye of the needle for the purposes of walking through it.
10. Set haystack on fire. Toast marshmallows. Use calculated gallons of water for house fire to put out haystack fire. Poke through the ashes and find small metal lump. That's your needle.

7 comments:

Interrobang said...

That's positively brilliant. How, pray tell, do you propose getting a haystack into an MRI/x-ray machine?

Deacon Barry said...

1.Obtain one herd of cows.
2.Feed hay from haystack to cows.
3.Wait for inevitable gastro-intestinal output.
4.Collect resulting meadow muffins
5.Place in MRI scanner
6.Repeat stages 2 to 5 until needle shows up in scan.

Beach Bum said...

One option would be to set up a short conveyor belt that passes by a metal detector. Start shoveling the hay on the belt with it being dumped on the other end. Once the metal detector detects the needle have it trip a relay that stops the belt. Inspect the hay right under the metal detector for the needle.

Deacon Barry said...

Alternatively, construct a wind tunnel around the scanner, with a big fan and the haystack on one side, and a combine harvester on the other. The fan blows the hay through the scanner, and the harvester collects it and forms it into another stack.

AlisonH said...

Absolutely hysterical.

Julie said...

There's a very easy way of finding the needle - sit on the haystack. By murphy's law, it's bound to be poking up just where you park your backside. You will then get rushed to A&E (if there's any left by the time they've finished shutting them all), leave your dignity at reception, get the needle plucked out and a tetanus injection and collect your dignity on the way out. Easy.

Julie

Deacon Barry said...

Now why didn't I think of that? It works for me.