The Salesman and the Forty Nuns

[a nameless entity]

Around 1961 a computer salesman from IBM was traveling from IBM headquarters to a nearby city to do business with a new client. He decided to take the scenic route to the next city rather than the expressway. It took him longer than he expected, and it got dark outside. Then it began to rain. Then his car broke down. But he saw he was quite close to a gate in the wall surrounding a large building. He walked over to the gate and rang the bell. There was no answer, but he could hear singing inside the building. He rang the bell again. Still there was no answer, but as he was about to return to his car he heard footsteps, and then a small door in the gate opened and he could see a face. To his surprise it was the face of a young nun. He explained his problem to her, and asked if he could use their telephone to call a tow truck. She said yes of course he could, and let him inside. She led him to the mother superior's office, and asked him to wait there. After a time the mother superior came in and let him use her telephone.
It was arranged that a tow truck would come the next morning to take his car to the local garage for repair. After he completed his call the salesman thanked the mother superior, and they got to talking. He explained what he did for a living and how he had come into that line of work, etc. The mother superior offered him the use of the couch in her office to sleep on and some breakfast in the morning. He thanked her for her generosity, and asked if there was anything that he could do to help them in return.
"Oh we all have had a problem lately, but I don't think it's anything you could help us with" the mother superior confided. "What is it?" the salesman asked "perhaps I can be of some help." "Oh it's nothing really, but all forty of us here in the convent have had a great deal of trouble getting to sleep at night lately" she replied.
"Well you know, most problems can be reduced to mathematics" said the salesman "Of course we don't have access to a computer, but I minored in mathematics in university, which is how I ended up with this job, so let's see what we can come up with" he said, as he got a large pad of paper out of his briefcase.

"Now computers use binary code," he explained "but we don't need to bother with that. So we'll just write out the numbers 0-9 and then code in the problem below them"

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
S L E E P N I G H T

"Now how long has the problem been going on?" he asked. "Oh for 5 weeks I think, yes that's right, for tonight will be the 35th night" the mother superior replied. "Well that's easy" said the salesman "34 nights so far, almost 5 weeks, we'll find the value of the problem by subtracting 345 from its opposite of 543....."

543-345 = 198

"so the value of the problem is 198. Now, there are 40 nuns, so 198 divided by 40 is...."

198/40 = 5.5

So the value per nun is 5.5 and there are 40 nuns so......

5.5x40 = 220

Now all we have to do is multiply the value of the problem times the total value of the nuns, and we should have the solution which we can take back to the original program of 0-9 and SLEEPNIGHT and decode it.......

198x220 = 43560

As the salesman looked at his carefully deduced answer, he felt his back, neck, and face get very hot as they turned beet red with embarrassment. The mother superior was just a second slower than the salesman, and the look on her face went from shock to a hard, angry line across the mouth.

The tow truck showed up the next morning, and the salesman was able to complete his journey to the city.

But as he sat shivering in his damp clothes inside the car that night, and tried to get comfortable so that he could sleep as the heavy rain drummed on the roof, the salesman couldn't help but wonder if it wouldn't have been better for everyone if he had taken the expressway after all.

[Hermskii]

Pain. That hurt to read and go through Nameless to get to the final answer. Bad boy! LOL.