The Aspirins and the Thermostat
It is finally time for the new puzzler! After quite a long break. We finally have a new one. This is good.
This is challenging and interesting, folkloric and historical if you will. Historical because it's from the past, basically.
We are bringing this one out from the Crusty Files. We are resurrecting this one.
For those of you that don't know, Crusty was our employee at the shop in the early to mid-1970s. So, a long time ago now. When he first came to work with us, he was a rather methodical, organized fellow. When he came to work that first day, he brought with him two huge toolboxes and put them on either side of his workbench. And then, he hung up all his calendars filled with pretty girls, as they all had back then. And his own coffee maker. All that stuff.
And I noticed that when he set up his tools, on the bench was a large bottle of aspirin. And I thought, either this guy gets a lot of headaches, or he creates a lot of headaches. And over the next few months, the level of the aspirins in this big bottle kept going down, but I never saw him take any himself.
So one day, I was observing him at his work, to make sure he was doing a good job. He was replacing a thermostat in a customer's cooling system for one of our cars. I saw him take two aspirins from the bottle. And then I watched as he seemed to be somehow placing these two aspirins in the thermostat. The thermostat is a spring-loaded device which when the thing heats up, the spring gets compressed and allows water to flow from the engine to the radiator. So, here was Crusty. He was putting two aspirin in the thermostat and then he proceeded to put the thermostat in the engine.
I watched him do this. And I was so puzzled by this. And I thought, "If I ever figure out what he is doing, this will be a great puzzler!"
So here it is.
What was Crusty doing with the aspirins and the thermostat?
Good luck!
