It's Time for a Test

Here is question that should be on any medical, law, or other institute of higher learning’s entrance exam:


You have a fence that you share with a neighbor. One of the boards happens to fall off due to the age of the fence. The other boards have swelled and warped so that you can’t just put the board back in its original place. Both you and your neighbor have a dog and kids. Please select one of the following options to rectify the situation:

A: Hire a professional fence contractor to come to your house and assess the situation. Pay handsomely for a section of fence to replace the old section.

B: Ask your neighbor for a pipe wrench. That’s the right tool to fix a fence, right?

C: Lay the board in about the position it was in, and hope that the wind or an animal doesn’t knock it over.

D: Exam the boards and see that there are gaps in-between the neighboring boards that could be consolidated into enough space to place the old board back in it’s original position. Take a cordless drill and move the neighboring boards, and then replace the fallen board in its original position with screws.

For those of you scratching your heads, D is the correct answer.

A, B, and C may seem correct to the common sense challenged, but D is in fact the correct answer.

My doctor neighbor (soon to be done with his residency and will be a real doctor), the same one who asked me for an axe to take apart an old desk he had (I suggested a saw), picked C.

The board fell, my little dog escaped, but we got him back.

Still, come on. I’ve never considered myself a beacon of common sense, but I guess engineering in the real world has helped me move past those who’ve been buried in academia.