Minnesota Age Guessing
After graduating from college, I took a job with the 3M Company. Part of my training included a three-week workshop at their headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota. My wife had just delivered our second child, so she and our two young sons stayed behind in Texas.
One Saturday afternoon several of us new employees decided to walk around the Minnesota State Fair. We enjoyed looking at the exhibits, which helped take our minds off being homesick. After several hours, we had seen enough and began making our way to the exit gate. Just before reaching the gate, we stopped to observe some people gathered at an age-guessing booth. I was impressed with the man who guessed the exact ages of two older women. I had my own estimation of their ages but had miscalculated badly. I was now interested in this man and wondered how he had deduced the ages of the two women. I thought it might be a trick and then wondered if he could guess my age. One of the guys in our group named Reynard looked like a young teenager, even though he was 27. After discussing how the man in the booth could guess people’s ages so accurately, we all made the decision to send Reynard forward to see if the man was as good as he appeared to be.
The rules of the game were that if the man guessed the age of the person before him within a year of the correct age, he won. If he missed, the challenger was the winner and received a prize as his reward. The entry fee of $1 was paid, a small price to prove the man wrong and win a prize. Finally, it was our turn and Reynard wrote his correct age for the lady assisting at the booth. The man guessing Reynard’s age wrote his guess down after looking at our friend very closely. We were excited because we just knew he was going to miss by several years. The assistant turned over the card with Reynard’ s age — 27, and showed it to the crowd gathered to watch. Then she turned over the card revealing the guess of the man in the booth. It read 18.
We were ecstatic! He had missed the correct age by nine years. I remember thinking as we walked away, “Boy, did we ever fool him. He thought he was so smart!” We laughed and joked about our success all the way to the front gate. Then we noticed the prize in Reynard’s hand, and as suddenly as the laughing began, it stopped. The joke was on us. The small plastic toy we had won probably cost about 10 cents. We had just paid $1 for a 10-cent prize. I realized that the people in the booth didn’t really care if they actually guessed an age correctly or not. If they guessed it exactly right, they made a $1 profit, but if they missed it, they made a 90-cent profit. It was not the people in the booth who were fooled at all!
Lessons Learned:
• Things are not always as they appear
• Just because you have a college degree does not mean you can’t be deceived
• We often think we won when in reality we lost badly
• To avoid being deceived we need to think in greater depth than we normally do
