Why My Wife Is Pissed Off At You Guys

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A Letter to Click and Clack & A Puzzler


A senior couple accepted an invitation from old friends to come for an overnight visit. When they arrived and took their things to the guest room, which they knew very well from past visits, they found that it had been remodeled and the furniture rearranged. It was very nicely done and on each side of the bed was a bedside table with a reading lamp, reading material, and other appropriate items. The bathroom across the hall was also redone and featured a new, very artistically designed and tasteful sink.



The visiting husband often wakes in the small hours of the night. Perhaps it is due to his age, or perhaps it is the fact that during the day, at the slightest sign of fatigue, he immediately flops down for a nap. This usually occurs about four times a day. As usual that night, after a few hours of sleep, he awoke and opened his eyes. He lay still on his left side for ten minutes and then rolled over and shook his wife awake saying in an excited whisper, “I’ve got a great puzzler to send to Click and Clack. I’m going to be on the radio.”



What the fellow had thought of was the following series of letters and digits. The puzzle is, of course, what comes next in the sequence and for extra credit how did the series occur to the dunderhead.



SEE                 A verb

9EE                 A shoe size

LEE                A name

8EE                A shoe size

6EE                A shoe size

OhE                An exclamation

IhE                Nothing

5hE                Again nothing, but you should have it by now.

EhE                A Canadian expression with a bonus E









The Solution



Ehh                Come again



The critical clues are that he knew exactly how long he lay thinking about the puzzle and that he had to roll over to wake his wife. That he had to roll over means that he was lying facing away from the center of the bed, that is, toward the bedside table. There his eyes fell upon a digital clock. He saw that the time was 3:35. Because he was on his side the digits of the clock were turned 90 degrees from normal. Instead of running from left to right in his field of vision, they ran downward from top to bottom. This led him to notice that upside down at 3:35 the block numbers of the clock formed the word SEE. An inverted three is an E and an inverted 5 is an S. The rest of the series is the times between 3:36 and 3:44 each turned upside down.



Get a digital clock. Check it out.