My brother worked at an amusement park a few years back. He worked in
the games area, his game was the one where you have to toss a ring and
get it around the neck of a soda bottle. The skill developed by those
game workers over the course of just a summer was incredible, I saw
them perform the feats that would have won a customer a huge toy,
effortlessly.
Anyway, one of the games was the "guess your age" thing. The game was
set so that the guesser could guess either:
(1) your age (within three years -- or maybe it was four) OR
(2) your birth month (within two months), OR
(3) your weight (within 10 pounds),
And the choice was yours.
It turns out that with the "guess the month" thing, it was just a
matter of statistics. There are only 12 months. And if the guesser
has to be right within two months, that gives him a five month window
in which to be right. He's got a 5 in 12 chance of being right. The
odds are a little less than 50/50. That's a better chance than 1 in
12.
The same goes for the "guess your weight" thing. A teenage girl comes
up, average size and build ... it's not amazing if you consider that
it's obvious she's not 250 pounds.
Here, a little knowledge of people's sizes in general comes in handy,
and doesn't take long to acquire, maybe a day or two on the job. An
average size adult male is probably 160 pounds (for example), just
make adjustments in your head to account for larger or smaller than
average men.
It also turns out, statistically, that the smaller the person, the
larger the chance of getting it right. Remember, the "window of
error" stays fixed at ten pounds, no matter how heavy you are. So if
you have to guess correctly within ten pounds, you're going to have a
better chance of being right if you guess a 6 year old's weight, than
if you guess the weight of someone much larger than average.
Anytime I encounter these games, I usually win. You see, being rather
overweight (about 290 pounds), the margin of error is small, compared
to my overall weight. So, rarely do they get it right within ten
pounds. The "always be courteous to customers" thing comes into play
here too, because they would not want to offend a 200 pound woman by
guessing she's 250 pounds.
The "guess the age" thing was a little easier, it turns out. It sure
sounds hard, but think about it. Just looking at a kid, you KNOW he's
not 40. So a ten-year old walks up. The guesser can rightly guess
anything between 7 and 13. That's a pretty doggone big window of
chance.
And just like the weight game, the window of error is fixed, so that
makes it statistically harder to guess someone's age the older they
are. And again, like the weight game, the "be courteous to the
customer" comes in again. You don't want to offend anyone.
But just like some knowledge of average body size/weight is good, so
is good observation, when trying to guess age. Have you ever seen
naval veterans with baseball hats that show the ship they served on
and the years they were enlisted? Have you ever seen t-shirts that
say "it took me 60 years to look this good"? Little clues like that
can get a guesser within 10 years or so of someone's age pretty
readily, then the window of error comes into play again. |
