You arrive for your
first day at a new job, delivering cardboard boxes somewhere in the
Midlands. It’s a weekday evening shift, and at 7pm precisely, the
boss hands you your run sheet.
“Here you go; 6 drops; 4
farms and 2 cottages this evening. There’s two sorts of order that
customers can place, the Nextdays and the Weeklies. As far as
you’re concerned though, all these have got to get there
tonight.”
You glance at the
schedule but it seems to have been written out for your
predecessor, who was obviously on first name terms with all his
customers, and knew where they all lived. Still, you don’t want to
look stupid on your first day so you accept it and decide you’ll
work it out for yourself.
“There’s the van” says
the boss, chucking some keys at you and pointing to a rather dented
and scraped old runabout. “I’m afraid the heater’s stuck on full
blast, an annoying voice keeps telling you ‘Pliss to weir seatbert’
even when you already are, the tape player doesn’t work and the
radio tuner knob broke so it can’t be set to anything except Radio
4, but I’m sure you’ll manage. Do the deliveries in the order on
the sheet, or you’ll get lost. And when you’ve finished them all,
pop round to Brian, Jenny and Alice’s place and pick up a package –
they’ll leave it out for you somewhere nearby.” You look
enquiringly at her for more information but she’s already heading
back to her office. Oh great, you think, another one to work
out…
You start the
engine (on the fourth try, by hammering the accelerator and causing
a cloud of bluish smoke to belch from the exhaust) at exactly
7:02pm and within 13 minutes you have discovered not only how many
boxes are to be delivered to each address, but also the exact
location of the package to be collected.
You also note
that you needn’t have visited any of the delivery addresses in
person in order to find where the package is!
You can check your
answers for this puzzle on
Geochecker.com.