He taught me everything in puzzles from Caesar cipher to Simple riddles. We used to play daily with his puzzles. As time proceeded, he also imbibed lateral thinking into me. He asked me, a puzzle:
A man wanted a clock for the wall, the traditional kind with an hour hand and a minute hand; but he wanted its hands to move counterclockwise. Why?
I was thinking. Why someone would want time to be reversed, because he might have wanted to see the time in a mirror.
When I told this to my dad, he I could see that he was impressed but he hid that and told me, “Son, you are pretty close. Think further!”
I thought for a while and got the answer. How did I miss it the first time?
The man must have been a hairdresser and wanted a clock where he could see it and tell time easily, but where his customers could see it and tell time, too. He did not want a small clock on his counter, because the counter space would have been so limited. He could not mount anything on the large mirror in front of his customers. Therefore, he wanted a backwards clock for the rear wall, so that it would appear correct to customers who looked in the mirror. He knew that he could learn to tell time from it after a bit of practice (subtracting time from twelve would be the trick!)
Dad was very happy with the way I was solving his puzzles.
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