Riddle: A young woman lives on the top floor of a 13-story building.

Every day, she walks downstairs to and from her job at the printing press.

One day, an old woman arrives at her floor with a delivery of one hundred carnations. The young woman blushes, sneezes, accepts the flowers, thanks the old woman, and closes the door.

She then takes the elevator to the main lobby, walks to the entrance of a nearby park, pulls a revolver from her left pocket and shoots herself in the left temple.

Why did the young woman decide to take her own life?

Got this from a forum and thought it was good. Credits go to Kinny100. Don't google it unless you want to spoil it for yourself. =X

earlier that day, she went online and there were a bajillion spoilers for hp and she couldn't handle it.

Uhhh, not relevant to harry potter... at all, haha.

EDIT: Think very carefully. The first line contains a logic clue if you can figure it out.

because she found out her lover is dead?

How do you walk downstairs TO your work, and then downstairs FROM your work back home? That's downhill both ways...

She's obviously deathly allergic to carnations

Otherwise she would have died a slow, painful death...

Alex O is on to something, but no, she isn't allergic.

CQ wrote:

Alex O is on to something, but no, she isn't allergic.

his first comment or the second one?

First comment

she lived at the top of this building:



gotta love mc escher.

but really. is the number 13 relevant or the number just to make the riddle sound all mysterioso?

does it have anything to do with why it's her left pocket and left temple?

Victoria, it is relevant, but the answer would still be the same would it be 11 or 15.

Bruce, no, it could be right and it would still be the same.

does the answer have to do with why she has to go to the park?

Why she has to go in the park is included in the answer, yes.

is this Inception? She wanted to wake up from a dream

I admit I looked at the answer and all I can say is...

wtfwhyyyy this riddle is terrible lawlz >:

melodiiousness wrote:

I admit I looked at the answer and all I can say is...

wtfwhyyyy this riddle is terrible lawlz >:

You made me curious, i went and googled it myself.


Yeah...we got trolled.

answer plz

i'm guessing there is no answer. courtney, find one with another one but with a real mindfunk answer, please.

Uhm, there is an answer, lol. I'll give it out tomorrow midnight i suppose.

I don't think this is even humanly possible to solve..

does shooting have anything to do with shooting a picture.
and taking her life have anything to do with "taking a picture" of her life.
lolzidk.

you cant take a picture of yourself with a revolver lolol

Dude I just read the answer and it was basically tl;dr status. THIS IS NOT A RIDDLE (

yeah but you can take a picture of yourself. "with a revolver" loll

EDIT: read the solution. wtf is this....

Dang man. So much for integrity. Will post answer when I get home

EDIT: Anyways, the answer!

The young woman, Gertrude, was consigned to work for an old-style door-to-door greetings company in the big city. The company delivers flowers and a greeting card to a friend or relative's door for a fee. The young woman found the job through a personal ad offering temp work for people in her situation -- the idea being that she would have a place to stay and a simple job for a week, with the possibility of more permanent work if she was good at what she did, and reasonable enough hours that she would have time to find someplace else to stay and work by the time the week was done.

The business, Carnations and Celebrations, is a vertically integrated workforce that does all the card printing and flower cultivation & display work itself. Printing is all done in one building, bouquet design in another building across the street; between the two buildings is a privately owned park in which thousands of beautiful flowers bloom. Most of all, carnations. The whole joint is enclosed by heavy steel gates, allegedly in order to keep company culture exclusive.

This last bit understandably sketches Gertrude out. But the dude who owns the place, Dennis, seems nice enough, and he makes the deal seem all the better by offering her a fantastic penthouse apartment to share with her fellow temp workers. So she takes him up on his offer and moves into the room one summer night, and everyone gets along fabulously. They drink, hang out on the outside terrace, gaze fancibly upon the big city they all aspire to soon take on, and have a fabulous time on the C&C Printing Press's 13th floor.

The next morning they all rush downstairs a single floor for training. The workplace conditions are abysmal. There is barely any natural light, and conditions are cramped. The temp workers all work together on the 12th floor on outdated equipment with no safety provisions, little fresh air, and an overly hot atmosphere which is made worse by the steam and fumes generated by the primary printing unit in the corner -- the Stapler, Dennis calls it. This massive unit finalizes all the assembly work done by the other temp workers and it requires an awful amount of exertion to be operated properly. No one volunteers to work it, and at first no one has to -- enough bulk material needs to be made for it to get started on it, and Dennis says it won't need to be operated until at least after lunch. But even the involuntary "warm up" process of starting the machine creates enough fumes to nauseate everyone in its proximity. Dennis makes it clear through his tone that being assigned to the Stapler will be something of a punishment: the ultimate grunt work, for anyone who acts up too much during the morning's training process.

Our hero, Gertrude, recognizes these conditions to be in violation of multiple labor laws. Unlike her coworkers, she already has another job and a place to live lined up not long after she leaves this place, and anyway, she's never been one not to let her voice be heard in dire conditions such as these. She's not excessively bold at first, but after work has gotten started and everyone is clearly miserable working their shifts in this cramped, hot, musky room with their rusty tools, Gertrude pulls Dennis aside with a list of grievances. She'll finish today's shift, she says, but after that, she can't promise any more work. Fine, Dennis replies. He's calm, at first; he seems to receive the criticism well.

But it turns out Dennis isn't a man of words; he's a man of action. That afternoon, Gertrude is assigned to the Stapler.

_


It's so much more brutal than she had anticipated. It's backbreaking work, and the fumes go right in her face, clouding her thoughts, distorting her sense of time. Before she knows it, she is totally worn out, the day is over, and her coworkers have already clocked out. She doesn't even realize the day is over until a siren and flashing lights evidently signify that it's time to leave. Gertrude looks around for the door and stumbles over to it in her confused exhaustion, but finds that it's locked, and the elevator is unoperational. She waits around for a few minutes until a security guard comes by and directs her, in her disoriented state, downstairs, one floor down, through a dark corridor into a tiny bedroom where she immediately falls to sleep.

She wakes up the next morning and it's the same way it was was the morning before -- the rush downstairs, the sound of scurrying coworkers nearby, etc. But this morning she's all alone. And from what little she sees of the 11th floor living arrangements, it's nothing like penthouse she stayed at not long ago. It's hardly a shack.

The 10th floor is familiar, at least, not unlike the 12th floor. Only this morning Gertrude is immediately assigned to the Stapler... and she realizes that she doesn't recognize any of her coworkers. This time she's the only "working class," miserable temp worker -- everyone else is in uniforms, doing a modicum of physical work but at least working side by side with design professionals and the like. The conditions are a little better, and there's an open window near her machine to keep the room from filling up with fumes from the Stapler. But Gertrude still catches the brunt of the fumes, nauseated and confused as she was the day before, and all the more tired and miserable -- but too out-of-it to complain. Before long, the day is done, and it ends not unlike the way it did the night before. Stairs, security guard, shack on the floor below, etc etc.

With each passing day of the continuing week Gertrude is more and more nauseated by the fumes, more pummeled by the sheer amount of brutal work she's made to do, yet less capable of speaking up, as she begins to forget how she even got in the position of working her job or why. The fumes are doing a number on her cognitive abilities in the present, as well as her memory. Time flashes by, routine stays steady. By day 6 she's working on the third floor with NOTHING but straight-up white collar employees, many with their own offices, and Gertrude is now working a Stapler in its own glass booth, with fumes hot-boxing the booth. Everyone else totally ignores her and to be honest, at this point, she's on the brink of giving up; she hardly knows who she is anymore, she's so disoriented.

_


When Gertrude wakes up the next morning, in her second floor shack, she's about to head downstairs like normal when she's greeted by a flower delivery girl who apparently has visited her room accidentally, as she's come with an order of carnations intended for a company higher-up. One sniff of the carnations -- to which Gertrude is the slightest bit allergic -- and it all comes back to her. Dennis. Her coworkers. Her aspirations. The big city. Suddenly it all connects. Ever since she put her voice out there the first day, she labelled herself as a troublemaker and was assigned to the Stapler -- a position no one would ever think to do voluntarily, surely not and thus a position one would have to be compelled into working. A job so bad Dennis couldn't recruit even the most desperate workers to do it. So, she realized, he'd have to do something wild like set up a honeypot temp job... and assign only the most "deserving" workers to the Stapler. My god, she realized. There must be new temp workers for every day of the week, handling the Stapler on every other floor. And no one ever reports a thing like this cause these undocumented, unpaid workers are too disoriented to do anything about it.

Then a thought hit Gertrude. She's supposed to be here for a week, and it's been six days. Where's she gonna sleep tonight, assuming she works the Stapler downstairs and the flow of the week's living/working arrangements continues -- in the basement? Not a good prospect. Then she looks to the flower delivery girl. An old woman, not unlike herself, with no nametag, a blank stare, and clearly defined wrinkles bespeaking years of awful, awful work. My god, Gertrude realized. She could be me. Dennis is either gonna off me in the basement or assign me to a dead-end job like this old lady's and my memory'll be as clean-slated as it nearly is already, or, or...

Gertrude's little moment of clarity was flushing away rapidly. She knew she had only a very short window of time before her nausea came back and she was locked back into routine -- at this point, security guards weren't even ensuring her flow from point A to point B, cuz the only life she knew was walking down those steps and working the Stapler to which she had surely been assigned. It was time to do something radical, something to stop this once and for good; something to ensure no one would be in her position again. It would be too long a run to leave the company gates, and her head was starting to throb anyway -- she was in terrible pain.

But she could at least muster the strength to walk outside, get a last breath of fresh air... and give the company some bad publicity.

too much to read. @.@

TL;DR

...Was she carrying the revolver in her pocket the whole time? And did she not shower/eat/drink for those 6 days?