Mac-Coleman

10 December 2013 –

The Human & Animal New Kingdom Society.  THANKS! 

A friend recently forwarded an e-mail in which the following four questions were asked and answered.  The purpose was to show how disparate thinking can be useful. 

Question #1:  How do you put a giraffe into a refrigerator?

Answer 1. Open the refrigerator, put the giraffe inside and close the door. Theoretically, the question tests whether you tend to do simple things in an overly complicated way. 

Question #2: How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator?

Answer #2: Open the refrigerator, take out the giraffe, put in the elephant, and close the door. This tests your ability to reflect on the consequences of previous actions. 

Question #3:  The Lion King is hosting an Animal Conference.  All the animals except one attend.  Which animal?

Answer #3: The elephant, silly; you just put him in the refrigerator.  This tests your memory.  

Question #4: There is a river you must cross, but there are crocodiles in it, and you don’t have a boat. How do you manage to get across the river?

Answer #4: You jump in and swim across.  Weren’t you listening?  All the animals, including the crocodiles, are at the conference.  This tests your ability to learn quickly from your mistakes. 

To answer as the author intended, you must abandon reality and allow simplistic conditions to guide your thinking.  I missed all four questions.  Then, I set sanity aside and other, more rational answers quickly came to me. 

    

Answer #1.  Only the government would be dumb enough to study how to put a giraffe in a refrigerator. So, you should bid for the contract.  First, project building a super-large refrigerator powered by solar energy with wind power as a back-up and leasing one middle-aged, male giraffe from a federally-funded zoo.  Then, you use stimulus money left over from 2009 to hire a small, minority-owned, freight company to move the giraffe to the newly-built refrigerator.  A National Parks Service official supervises the move, and three volunteers from the ASPCA video the event.    Once you get the giraffe in the refrigerator, a contracted wildlife expert oversees its care through a specially-designed door.  Total one-year contract cost: $17,500,000.   

Answer #2.  As all federal programs are wont to do, this refrigerator concept grows.  Three giraffes die due to ineffective temperature control, resulting in $25,000,000 in cost overruns in the first year, but you iron out the glitches, do a little research, and declare that the program now is ready to include elephants.  You bid for the new contract, citing your expertise with giraffes.  You also note that the higher elephant leasing costs, the costs for a larger refrigerator, the new health-care insurance package which the freight company’s employees’ union recently negotiated with management (exempted from adherence to Obamacare), and the hiring of an elephant expert to assist the Parks Service official, will raise the cost to $48,750,000.  After you win the elephant contract, the wildlife expert says she can oversee the care of both the giraffe and the elephant, but she needs three assistants.  An additional $400,000 brings the elephant contract cost to $49,150,000 and $42,500,000 for the second year of the giraffe contract. 

Answer #3. The American Bald Eagle does not attend the Animal Conference.  The giant wind turbine blades in surrounding alternate energy wind-farms make it too dangerous for him to fly in and land at the conference site.  The elephant and the giraffe are virtual attendees through 40’ interactive screens.  The purchase and set-up costs—by union labor, of course—add only $2,300,000 to the conference cost of $147,900,000.  Fortunately, all costs are covered by the federally-funded, USAID-dispensed program, The Human & Animal New Kingdom Society, THANKS.

    

Answer #4. Although Congress won’t declare war on animals, you proclaim that river crocodiles are an existential threat to the nation’s security, thereby rallying support from your fellow travelers who want to cross the river.  However, you manage the conflict so badly that crocodiles eat five hundred of your troops, and you waste ten years and one hundred billion dollars trying to build a coalition of responsible and friendly alligators, caimans, and great lizards to help the crocodiles assimilate into an international family of friendly animals.  Finally, you negotiate a treaty with the crocodiles that allows you to cross the river on their backs and allows them unimpeded movement across your borders. 

Final government cost of The Human & Animal New Kingdom Society programs: $1,284,350,000, more or less, and ten years of war.  But now, we project many more meaningful years to come.  THANKS!