The Collective Endeavor

It's time for a new puzzler. If you'd like to repeat my brother's favorite not-so-silent prayer, we can take a minute for that now. "Please let it be better than please let it be better than the last one!"

Moving on! We received a letter a few weeks or months or years ago, I can't remember, which, which my brother promptly lost. And it had in it a bunch of what I call multitudes or collective nouns.

You are probably familiar with many of these. A gaggle of geese, a host of angels, etc.

Anyway, we would like to initiate a contest, to come up with some of these that are related to some of the sleazier occupations that we've mentioned on the show like automobile mechanics, talk show hosts, lawyers, judges, people who drive salt trucks.

And we thought that this might be a puzzle that we could milk--I mean we could use--for a few weeks, months, years, whatever. And we would invite you to submit.

Here are the rules now. We want clever, clever, like, like a shortage of jockeys. A compact of bimbos, a lot of car salesman, a shrug of mechanics!

And do we want quality or quantity? Both.

The decision of the judges will be final. They may be stupid but they will be final

And we may develop multiple categories, for example, best, worst, and most!

Well, anyway, if you would like to participate in this endeavor, I can only say certainly not a puzzle, but like a puzzle. It's a sort of contest. We'll just call it a collective endeavor.

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

The Oil Light

This is a real-life puzzle. We had a fella that came into the shop with an 85 or an 86 Dodge Caravan as luck would have it, with a 2.2. engine. The smallest engine that they make. And he had a bad camshaft and his mechanic had put a new one in there because this other camshaft was made out first.

So instead of having clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack from a worn out camshaft, he had a relatively quiet engine. He replaced the camshaft and all of the hydraulic lifters and the rockers rather. Okay, so he had this new camshaft in there, and everything was great. Except that he had a little problem. The oil light was on all the time. So he went back to the mechanic and the mechanic checks the oil pressure and says, "You don't have enough oil pressure. That's why your oil light is on." So he said, "How did that happen?"

Because the oil light had not been on prior. So he said, "Okay, what do I need now? Another 300 bucks for a new oil pump?" And the mechanic says, "Yeah. Debris from the old camshaft must have gotten in there and chewed up the old pump."

And as you might suspect, he did the oil pump did do the oil. So the light didn't remain on, but an interesting thing happened. The light no longer came on ever, even when he turned the key on the on position. But what he didn't notice is that the engine was racing all the time. Oh, that's when he took the car to us, the court of last resort. We had the car for a month and we indeed verify that he had low oil pressure. But interestingly, the light was not on.

Well, we found the light was not going on because it was unplugged. Oh, so we plugged it back in. And lo and behold, the light came on.

The question is what's going on here? The hint is what's going there's nothing wrong with the rest of the motor. The engine is fine. At least, all the parts that could cause oil pressure, are all fine. But! Something else went awry on this job. So what is it?

Now, this is not an easy puzzle. This is tricky. It has to be tricky, because, yeah, we didn't figure it out for a month.