All professors have a secret repertoire of exam questions that could be drawn on when they want to get a student in trouble, and maybe knock him off.
One of these questions was suggested to me by a friend professor who had been a very good athlete and an expert in sports facilities, but it was a little staggering:
– How long should the bar counter in a stadium be?
Thinking about it with a cool head, the question wasn’t too difficult, but in the tension of the exam it could result deadly.
To get the answer, first one had to put some references, hypothesizing a typical situation. Normally each stadium sector has its own bar, and if we imagine that in a sector of 3000 seats 25% of people take coffee during the interval of a game, the bar should provide 750 coffees in 15 minutes, that is 50 coffees per minute.
The average time of a coffee drink, which can vary depending on the type of service, environmental factors etc., can be estimate in 45 seconds. 15 minutes are 900 seconds, and divided by 45 is 20, i.e. every 45 seconds 20 people will come to the counter; therefore, given to each person a space of 2 ft, the length of the counter will be 2 ft x 20 = about 120 ft. This could be an average result: depending on how the staff is organized and on their capacity, it’s possible a little wider or a little narrower measure, even admitting some queues.
Generally, the students attending the exams carefully listened those little tests of skills to get dimensions not subdued to particular rules, solved with empirical and largely probabilistic evaluations which had to be adapted to the case, but could be used in similar situations.
If we come to think about it, in fact, that reasoning was the same that a lord of a castle had to do to evaluate if he could defend his crenellated walls, or the sanitary officer who had to size the burial fields of the municipal cemetery, or the restaurant manager for the tables to be served and so on.
So, seeing a queue at an highway tollbooth, a ticket office or at a vaccination post, often I wonder if the persons who designed those places took a Distributive Characters exam, and what grade they got.
