This time, with rules.
The other post got me thinking, here’s my version.
For 5 million dollars, the task is the hide a paperclip in your home from a professional investigator. You have 15 minutes to hide it, they have 12 hours and subcontractors to find it. You cannot leave your house or have anything shipped in during your 15 minutes. You have to leave immediately after the 15 minutes is up, and you cannot have the paperclip on your person. Any family members, friends, and all pets will also be removed from the premises, and they aren’t allowed to have the paperclip.
You must be able to produce the original paperclip at the end in order to win the challenge. It is marked in some way that you don’t know but the investigator can verify. Absolutely no substitutions. You can bend the paperclip, but not cut it.
The paperclip must be inside the building. Not in a shared entryway, not outside the walls in any way. Between the studs of the outside walls of whatever you own or rent as living space are as far as you can go.
Any damage done by the investigator or subcontractors will be repaired back the way it was at no charge, win or lose. They are not allowed to harm the structural integrity of your home/apartment.
OP, please edit your title to make it a question.
Oh right, sorry.
Straighten it and use a needle to push it into a tube of toothpaste.
That’s a good one. Can’t metal detect inside a metal tube, not an obvious hiding spot at all
What about a CT/xray though? Id imagine investigator would be motivated enough to use one
What sort of x ray machine could be transported to the site? What size things would fit in a portable x ray machine? How long would each exposure take?
Xrays can be pretty immediately viewable they are used by airport security all the time there are smaller portable imaging machines that are more portable but really if i was investigator id start by having my team removing everything from the place and transporting it to the machine. The one half does the imaging and the other half starts tearing into the residence. Whoever finishes first gets to look through every xray image so that every person has inspected every image at least once
Oh right. It would take some time, but not 12 hours to run everything in the house through the X-ray. Including breaking down larger items for scanning.
Yea and some items could be grouped together like toothbrushes and pens/pencils. It would definitely at least take half the day but if assuming unlimited funds/manpower you could have multiple machines manned by teams
Jokes on them, I keep a bunch of old screws, nails, etc. They come in handy. I’d disturb those containers and mix in part the box of paperclips I already have. Then dump the others around the house randomly.
Then, tilt my fridge and hide the correct one under it, in the little lip formed by where the metal is rolled.
Unless they actually lift the fridge and turn it almost upside down, that damn thing isn’t coming out of that lip.
By the time they’ve gone through all of the fake hiding spots and determined that all of the other clips are the wrong ones, a big portion of the time is gone (and I’m assuming the clip somehow identifiable and that they have a way of doing so, otherwise they’re screwed from the beginning)
Nobody with sense is going to turn the fridge over to check under it unless they’ve exhausted other places.
It’s all about wasting their time and making use of human habits, not necessarily a super secret spot.
But, that spot rules out metal detectors, and won’t have visible signs of recent movement (because I keep the kitchen absurdly clean, there’s no built up dust or grime under it to show the movement). If I hadn’t had to turn the fridge on its side to get under they’re for some repairs, I wouldn’t know the lip existed in the first place. So the chances of any of the investigators and/or subcontractors also knowing that a decades old model of refrigerator happens to have a rolled metal lip is pretty damn low.
They’d do the human thing of looking under it, or even lifting it off the feet and checking under those, but not look further because any of the other places under there would allow a little piece of metal to fall out freely when their first search happened.
But, there’s a similar spot on the interior of our washing machine that I found when replacing a switch. Same kind of deal, but the area where the washer is isn’t as clean, so it would be obvious enough.
Nice!
And yes, I did say that they have a way of identifying which clip is the one you are supposed to hide.
Hide it in the insulation, then hide a bunch of dummy paperclips all through the house.
I put the paperclip in with other paperclips at my office supply warehouse. Do I live in an office supply warehouse? Yes. The investigators will have to rifle though millions of loose paperclips and thousands of boxed paperclips. They have to search my shipping and my receiving areas. As I’m leaving, a woman sees me. She says “can you sell me some office supplies?” . She’s the lead investigators. I say no. We make love all night. In the morning the cops come and I escape in one of their uniforms. I tell her to meet me in Mexico but I go to Canada. I don’t trust her. Besides, I love the cold. Thirty years later I get a postcard. I have a son. And he’s the Chief of Police. This is where the story gets interesting: I tell her to meet me in Paris by the Trocadero. She’s been waiting for me all these years. She’s never taken another lover. I don’t care. I don’t show up. I go to Berlin. That’s where I shipped the paperclip.
What even is this? What did I just read?
It’s a paraphrased quote from the office.
Poetry.
Straighten it, drill a small hole perpendicular to the hinge of one of your doors, put it inside and cover the hole up. If there’s enough time, add some paint to it, otherwise just use the sawdust mixed with some glue. The hole is certainly tiny enough to get unnoticed and any metal detector would hopefully pick up the larger metal hinge instead of the paperclip. Finally, if you also paint it up, it would practically be invisible. Just make sure you use a paint that doesn’t smell too strongly.
This guy murders. Username checks out too
I bribe one of the underpaid contractors to hang onto it. Or i bribe the investigator to not find it. You didnt say he would get paid. I leave out an assortment of good foods/snacks and the remotes for the tv/controller so they can enjoy the day off. I then check in for my own nice spa day for my own day off
An unpaid investor would be barely motivated to search anything. Of course they’re paid.
Even a well paid crew member would do a lot for a million dollars or so. Might need to go higher if they know how much you stand to win.
Id totally be down to split the 5 mil evenly between all of us. We could all use some extra money these days
That would probably work out for you.
Drill a tiny hole behind the strike plate of a door frame, stick the straightened paperclip in, patch the tiny hole, reinstall the strike plate.
By the time they consider looking there, the patching compound should be dried and not easily distinguishable from the painted wood, except on very close inspection.
Any family members and all pets will also be removed from the premises, and they aren’t allowed to have the paperclip.
Get someone who isn’t a family member to shove it up their ass and stay in the house
Haha! Nice workaround.
I guess they’ll just have to do exploratory surgery and put your friend back together the way they were before they leave.
I edited to add that friends would have to leave the premises without the paperclip
If I were the investigator, I’d set the contractors loose on the house and then spend my time interrogating the competitor.
So as the competitor, I would hide it wherever. But then I would sit with noise cancelling headphones and eyes shut so as to not give the hiding place away. I would give it away with a glance or a face twitch much faster than they could search.
Hmm
I didn’t factor in interrogation. The competitor would leave the premises without contacting the investigator.
No interrogation, no spying on you as you leave. Checking for the paperclip on your person is done by a separate person/machine, away from the investigator or any of their crew.
I think 12 hours of interrogation is long enough to break anyone.
Counterpoint: they don’t need to interrogate me. I tell them I’ll give them a mill out of my five if they give up and don’t try to find it.
Aw man, I forgot to add a stipulation that you can’t bribe the investigator.
I have several boxes of paperclips at home, spread them out and as decoys, and put the real paper clip inside a mechanical pencil after straightening it out and put the pencil into a box of many different pencils, make a tiny mark with a file and mix it up.
The paperclip boxes will distract them for a few hours, but logic will dictate that mixing the paper clip with other’s is dumb as I need to be able to retrieve it with in a resonable timeframe.
Straighten it out, then twist it into a spring around a screwdriver. Remove a spring from some component and put the original in my spare parts box.
Idk how to do any better than this. Genius!
Grab a necklace made with wires and weave it through the metal. Put the necklace in with a bunch of other necklaces. Then take other paperclips and hide then around the place until time is up.
Straighten the paper clip and slip it inside the binding of an old copy of Britannica I have. I got it second hand from a public library, so it has quite a few of the old style anti-theft tags hidden throughout; it also contains quite a few paper clips of many colors I once used as bookmarks.
I use the remaining time to clean the house, making sure to go into the bathroom more than once, moving the toilet tank lid and opening and shutting all of the cabinets every time. If I’m very lucky I’ll be just shutting the medicine cabinet audibly when the investigators walk in. (For those not familiar, many houses built in the mid 20th century in the US had slots in the back of the medicine cabinet where you were supposed to dispose of used razor blades.)
I think they’d tear the entire house apart trying to find that thing. There’s a small chance someone would notice paper clips on the Brittanica and start checking for more. Whether they find it depends on whether they have access to x rays or a metal detector.
I have no doubt that they would, but that’s not one of the variables I’m trying to control. As far as I can tell, time and volume are the only two things that I can play with. They have a 30-minute timer, and cannot take the load-bearing walls down. That means there’s a volume constraint, no matter how many people they have available they can only fit so many in one space. That limits the amount of time they have to actually search, assuming they empty the dwelling. If they don’t empty the dwelling, it sharply limits the number of people they can have searching at any one time. Heavy equipment like an x-ray machine also limits that volume.
With respect to the Britannica, if you’re familiar with them you know they are massive and this one just happened to be my primary research source in high school. I cannot understate the number of flags and paper clips simply destroying those bindings right now. If someone does notice it, I’m relying on running out the clock with them checking every one they see first.
I put it through a laminator and cut it into a business card size. I then go up into the attic and press it down into the uninsulated interior wall between my office and son’s room. The size of the laminate should allow me to flex it slightly and pin it between the walls with tension. If they try to remove the wall it will fall into the crawlspace below the house and be caught by a pad of insulation.
Alternatively, tuck it into the barrel of the washing machine in said laminate. It won’t rattle and without fully disassembling it you won’t be able to retrieve it.
Rules here say “can’t cut it”.
I presume they mean cut the laminate, that would make sense then as to business card size. Still not cutting the paperclip
Cutting the clip wouldn’t work, but cutting the laminate is within the rules
