The Cold Salesman
Time for the new puzzler.
This comes from a friend of mine from a long time ago. He used to be a customer in the garage.
He was a traveling salesman for 30 years. Sold nuts and bolts, or something like that.
When he first started out on this job, I guess he immediately fell into disfavor with the company hierarchy, because he started in the middle of winter, and they assigned him such exotic places like Moose Jaw, Maine and Freeze Your Butt, New Hampshire... Places like that. Really, really cold places.
So he would have to travel by car from one location to another in the dead of winter. He often found himself driving from town to town in the winter looking for cheap motels in which to spend the night.
His route was very cold and snowy, it was Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, upstate New York... Places like that.
And he began to notice something disturbing on his travels. When he would stop at these motels, oftentimes the owner of the motel was also the front desk clerk. And the clerk would ask him to register for the room with name, address, home phone, credit card... Just in case he decided to skip out in the middle of the night. In some of those hotels they would ask for an occupation, and in some cases they would not ask for that.
But it seemed to be always the case that the motel owner would ask him what he did for a living when checking him in.
And then when he said he was a salesman, he would almost always be assigned a room on the second floor if they had one, or if the hotel had a second floor.
And my friend asked me if I knew why this was happening.
And I told him I did not have a clue as to why they would do this. So he gave me a clue.
I asked if it had anything to do with the car he was driving. And he said, I guess you could say that, because he was driving a Volkswagen then.
And from that, I was able to figure out the answer.
So, why was this happening?
Good luck.
