Odd customer questions

[mharbourgirl]

How much ham could a hamshit shit , if a hamshit could shit ham?



Good thing it's not bacon!

Screw slapping people over the internet or the phone.

Someone come up with a way to give a pie inna face over the internet. Because that's what that deserves.

[Stryker One]

Eye Candy

Today I had a customer ask me where he could find the nearby sports bar with 4000 TVs.

Uhhh, yeah. I can barely even imagine a sports bar with THAT many TVs, that would be one huge, crazy place.

Actually, if all those TVs could be hooked up together and used as one big video wall, that would make for one AWESOME bar.

[Imogene]

I asked him how many cups of sugar it takes to get to the moon. ^_^

Three and a half.
My absolute favorite stupid customer question came back when I worked at the Davenport. "Do you guys sell... furniture...?"
Notes: I am standing in the back corner of the store, having a discussion with the store manager, TK was standing at the register watching people, and you just walked through our entire inventory selection... did you see any sofas?

[Shalom]

On a related note, when one of my foremen said "there are no stupid questions", I asked him how many cups of sugar it takes to get to the moon. ^_^ He called me an F'ing idiot, lol.

Well, you know, you really could figure that out as well.

Sugar has 3.8 kcal/gram, more or less. This is equal to about 15.9 kilojoules.

The first stage of the Saturn V rocket burned RP-1, essentially highly refined kerosene, which has about 43 kj/gram. (LHV, not taking into account the heat of vaporization of the water produced) It carried about 645000 kilograms of the stuff, more or less (yes, Professor, I am keeping only 3 significant figures here). To get the equal amount of heat from burning sugar, you'd need 1.74 million kilograms, about 3.85 million pounds, or 769000 five pound bags (not counting the added heat from the paper of the bag). Since 1 cup (240ml) of sugar weighs around 200 grams, this comes out to more or less 8.7 million cups.

The second and third stages used liquid hydrogen for fuel, which has about 121 kj/gram, and carried about 72,000 kilograms in stage 2 and about 20,000 kg in stage 3. I leave the calculations for these stages to the student as an exercise.

See, there really are no stupid questions.

[Pedersen]

Well, you know, you really could figure that out as well.

Shalom, you're assuming that the point is to use sugar as an energy source to get to the moon. What if the question was actually asking how much sugar to produce a pole that you could use to climb to the moon?

Of course, the answer to that is a lot harder. You either have to go through a whole lot of structural engineering to build said pole, and deal with issues of things like the high velocity winds in the upper atmosphere, coupled with the fact that the moon's orbit is not perfectly circular, and said pole would really only reach the moon at one specific point in its orbit, so there's a whole lot of orbital mechanics, along with placement on the surface of the earth, weight of the pole, etc.

Alternately, you can just go with the easy version: The moon is approximately 260,000mi from the surface of the earth. Assume the pole will be a constant width, let's call it a 6 inch square. get all units in the same base, and we see 6in x 6in x 16,473,600,000in, or 593,049,600,000 cubic inches. Let's convert that downward a bit into something more useful: 41,077,028,600 cups (thank you Google). Now, that seems like a lot.

You've already given us the mass: 1 cup = 200g, so now we're at 8,215,405,720kg, or 8,215,406 metric tons. Assuming that this article's numbers are close enough and current enough, we can find that we would only need approximately 1/2 to 2/3 of the yearly crop from Brazil to have enough sugarcane to build our pole to the moon.

Keeping it intact, and usable? Well, that's left as my own little exercise for the reader

[Nyx]

Dumbest thing I've been asked for? Flamingos. Live flamingos too, he made sure to specify live. In his defense I think he was high...

[Whiskey]

Dumbest thing I've been asked for? Flamingos. Live flamingos too, he made sure to specify live. In his defense I think he was high...

You cant play croquet without flamingos

edit: live flamingos.

[TheMike]

Dumb question 1 "how late are you open?" when I'm standing under the "open 24 hrs" sign!!
dumb question 2 "where's your magazines?" as if the really big "magazines" sign directly in view as you enter wasn't a f'ng clue???

[alcaholjunkie]

Well, you know, you really could figure that out as well.

Sugar has 3.8 kcal/gram, more or less. This is equal to about 15.9 kilojoules.

The first stage of the Saturn V rocket burned RP-1, essentially highly refined kerosene, which has about 43 kj/gram. (LHV, not taking into account the heat of vaporization of the water produced) It carried about 645000 kilograms of the stuff, more or less (yes, Professor, I am keeping only 3 significant figures here). To get the equal amount of heat from burning sugar, you'd need 1.74 million kilograms, about 3.85 million pounds, or 769000 five pound bags (not counting the added heat from the paper of the bag). Since 1 cup (240ml) of sugar weighs around 200 grams, this comes out to more or less 8.7 million cups.

The second and third stages used liquid hydrogen for fuel, which has about 121 kj/gram, and carried about 72,000 kilograms in stage 2 and about 20,000 kg in stage 3. I leave the calculations for these stages to the student as an exercise.

See, there really are no stupid questions.

errrr... Rocket surgery isn't my strong-point. ^_^ Although I think red-bull would make a better fuel than sugar.

Shalom, you're assuming that the point is to use sugar as an energy source to get to the moon. What if the question was actually asking how much sugar to produce a pole that you could use to climb to the moon?

Of course, the answer to that is a lot harder. You either have to go through a whole lot of structural engineering to build said pole, and deal with issues of things like the high velocity winds in the upper atmosphere, coupled with the fact that the moon's orbit is not perfectly circular, and said pole would really only reach the moon at one specific point in its orbit, so there's a whole lot of orbital mechanics, along with placement on the surface of the earth, weight of the pole, etc.

Alternately, you can just go with the easy version: The moon is approximately 260,000mi from the surface of the earth. Assume the pole will be a constant width, let's call it a 6 inch square. get all units in the same base, and we see 6in x 6in x 16,473,600,000in, or 593,049,600,000 cubic inches. Let's convert that downward a bit into something more useful: 41,077,028,600 cups (thank you Google). Now, that seems like a lot.

You've already given us the mass: 1 cup = 200g, so now we're at 8,215,405,720kg, or 8,215,406 metric tons. Assuming that this article's numbers are close enough and current enough, we can find that we would only need approximately 1/2 to 2/3 of the yearly crop from Brazil to have enough sugarcane to build our pole to the moon.

Keeping it intact, and usable? Well, that's left as my own little exercise for the reader

You'd have to build it somewhere dry. May also need to have it guarded by Anteaters. ^_^


BTW; You two have too much time on your hands. :-P


Back on Topic; Suddenly remembered a scene from Clerks, (and found the clip of it here)

[Magpie]

1. I've known that finding answers on Google can be hard, depending on what you're searching for. Can't figure out how to search for "how much shit does one hamster make per month?"

2. I'm truly troubled by the desire to know this. Who actually thinks of these things? And do I need gloves if I share an internet forum with them?

1. I expected to get an answer with a search along those lines. I was quite surprised when it didn't provide it. (I think that I looked for per day instead of per month, but a quick search now doesn't give anything better in the first couple of pages if I look per month). Most of the hits are for pet owners, and for some reason the average pet owner doesn't actually care about the mass of feces that a hamster produces.

2. It was a numerical methods (programming) question. We had to do an integration to determine how many hamsters were required to power the car. The question was then asked if this was practical, and why. Now, when you need several billion hamsters it's obviously not practical, so I needed a funny "why" (I knew the TA). I had been hoping to find the amount of waste produced so that I could explain that burning the waste was a better way to power the car than charging a battery from hamster wheels. I ended up discussing how long feeding them would take instead.

[emax4]

While working at "Keytar Center" in the pro audio department, some woman came in and asked if we cut keys. I thought it was odd, but I remembered being in a grocery store and seeing that they DID have a key cutting machine in their office. So having witnessed that I didn't think it was that off base. We sent her to the local hardware stores though.

[Pedersen]

You'd have to build it somewhere dry. May also need to have it guarded by Anteaters. ^_^

I seem to recall hearing about these really dry places... what were they called? Oh yeah, deserts! That was them. That should be dry enough

As for the anteaters, probably. On the plus side, with the number of ants that would be attracted, picnic go'ers the world over would be safe for decades.

BTW; You two have too much time on your hands. :-P

Nah, that took me about 10 minutes to go through all the number crunching. You want to know too much time? My hour long commute each way every day? I do mental number crunching on telephone numbers. One of the things I remember about numerology: Add up all the numbers, get a result. If the result is greater than 10, add up all the digits, repeat until the final number is less than 10.

Mental trickery here: If you divide the original number by 9, then the remainder is equal to the sum, unless the remainder is 0, in which case the sum is 9 (unless the original number is 0, so the sum is 0, but then you wouldn't be using this trick at all). So, for instance, 1-800-555-1212? 1+8+0+0+5+5+5+1+2+1+2 = 30, so 3+0=3. 18005551212/9 = 2000616801, remainder 3. You can also remove groups that equal 9. 1+8=9, so remove, 5+2+2=9, so remove, leaving you with 5+5+1+1 = 12, 1+2=3.

And that's what I'm doing when the traffic is, once again, causing me to put my parking brake on. Just playing mental math games with the numbers around me. That's when I have too much time on my hands.