I Am So Smart S-M-R-T

George Burt, a guy I know from the dBase programming community, told this story recently:

When I was 16 or so (1977), I went with a couple friends to Bush Gardens in Tampa (about 30 miles from my home). Then, like now, I don't appreciate being told what to do, unless it makes sense to me. Don't run into the street. That makes sense. Changing lanes as soon as you see a "Merge left. Lane ends in 1500 feet" makes no sense, so I wait until I get to the end, then merge in front of all the idiots worry that they "won't be able to get over." True, there is the risk that I will get stuck forever trying to merge, but in almost 30 years of driving, it hasn't happened yet.

So now I approach the monkey cage that is ("was" actually, it is no longer there; I am using the future conditional pluperfect subjunctive for effect)... I approach the monkey cage that entertains people waiting to get on the monorail. The cage has about 20 very active spider monkeys. Plus, people feed them, so they paid careful attention to me as I approached. The cage is made of a rubber coated very fine chain link fence. The mesh is small, but just large enough so that the monkeys can get stick their tiny hands through the fence.

Now, here is part that challenged my intelligence. The cage bore a large, prominant sign "DO NOT GIVE THE MONKEYS YOUR KEYS!". Now, normally, it never would have occurred to me to give a monkey my car keys, but a sign like that gets an intelligent person to thinking. Clearly a monkey could grasp your keys through fence, but the mesh was much too small to pull the keys through. But, in addition to being intelligent, I am cautious and prudent. So first I let the monkey grab one of my fingers. If the animal's strength is sufficient to tear it off and leave me with a nub, then they might be able to pull a set of keys through the fence. Just as I suspected, the animal has some strength, but not nearly enough. I stand back, think about it, move to hand the eager monkey my keys and then stop and think about it some more. I am very cautious, but heck, the sign was insulting to me.

Finally, with great conviction and confidence, I hand the monkey my keys, but I am ready to grab them back the moment they are misused. The monkey instantly drops the keys and with a practiced motion snatchs them through a one inch gap at the bottom of the cage.

Acknowledgement:
This story is quoted as it was posted in the dbase.watercooler newsgroup on February 22, 2005 under the title "Monkey Cage and Bush Gardens." The author, George Burt, is a regular in the dBase programming community so I'm pretty sure this is a real story and not an urban myth.