How do you get out?

Title: How do you get out?

General Information about Item:

  • Verbal folklore (riddle)
  • Language: English
  • Country of Origin: United States
  • Informant: Dr. Syed Nasimul Alam
  • Date Collected: 5-22-19

Informant Data:

  • Syed Nasimul Alam is an assistant professor in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering at the National Institute of Technology (NIT) in Rourkela, India. He has helped write textbooks oriented towards engineers teaching the MATLAB programming language. He has also published nineteen papers to date on topics such as the synthesis of nanocomposites, nanoparticles, and various metal alloys. Before entering academia, Dr. Alam joined the Tata Iron and Steel Company as a Graduate Trainee and underwent eight weeks training with Steel Authority of India Ltd. in Durgapur, India.

Contextual Data:

  • Cultural Context: This riddle alludes to how creative engineers can be such that they can accomplish almost anything to their heart’s content, even getting themselves out of a hypothetical situation like the one at hand. By obtaining an answer from the listener–interestingly there could be multiple solutions–one can learn how creative someone is and perhaps their potential to succeed in pursuing in the sciences in general. It may not necessarily demonstrate quantitative intelligence due to the abstract nature of the possible solutions, but ingenuity surely. This riddle may be shared simply for fun during social gatherings.
  • Social Context: The informant believes to have heard this riddle from a colleague at university, a fellow mechanical engineering professor, during lunch break. The colleague’s intention was likely to pass the time and not to establish any sort of intelligence hierarchy with the informant, ie. independent of whether the informant could solve the riddle, which he could not. The informant occasionally shares this riddle to students during his weekly office hours.

Item:

Audio Transcript:

  • (3:02) “A man is in a cement room with no doors and windows. He has with him a mirror. How does he come out?…He also has a piece of wood…The man looks into the mirror to see what he saw…He then takes the saw to cut the piece of wood into two…Put the two halves to make a ‘whole’…And then move out through the hole.”

Informant’s Comments:

  • Alam appreciates stumping his post-doc researchers occasionally just for laughs as there is little way of obtaining the solution without simply knowing.

Collector’s Comments:

  • I was pretty shocked by the solution because it was not what I was expecting. It was much less grounded in reality than I thought it would be, but I love how even engineers can have fun from a play on words sometimes.

Collector’s Name: Aadil Islam

Tags/Keywords:

  • verbal folklore
  • jokes