I have a problem, and it’s probably one I shouldn’t be admitting, lest people begin using it against me. What? Still want to hear it? Should I really tell you? Oh, all right.
My mind is such that I am easily nerd sniped. Show me a problem, and at the very least I’ll be thinking about it while doing other things. The worst case scenario is that I’ll stop everything and start doing it, refusing everything else until I finish.
This has happened twice over the past few weeks. The first was on the NaNo forums before site relaunch when someone asked me how to do a particularly tricky derivative after finding out that I had a math degree. The product rule and quotient rule on that problem, along with all the factoring out afterward to make it pretty, kept me working for awhile.
I was lucky not to get nerd sniped by my own question in the Reference Desk description about knitting a sweater for a giraffe. Luckily someone already solved it by the time I saw that a thread had been made for that question. (In fact, I believe it’s the only one of the reference desk description questions that has a thread for it so far. Victory?) I even got lucky when it came to solving the one about making a tin foil ball the size of a garage.
Then came the cabbages. Someone wanted to know how many cabbages you could keep in a van. There was a van of the appropriate size in my driveway. I knew the size of a cabbage. No one had replied yet. I was determined to find the answer without buying cabbage. And so I solved it. It turned out to be relatively easy, and my very rough estimate of the van size (given that it was dark outside and I’m bad at guessing sizes) was closer than I thought after finding a size online. Hooray for me.
Now for more adventures in nerd sniping.