elanya

I thought it was the Dutch

How on earth can that be a noun rather than an adjective? Give me a demonstration sentence -- I need something to procrastinate over!

A device for creating problems or questions by providing events, outcomes or answers, where the instigator or question are unknown, for example a moment in the mid 1950's, Boy Bands and of course 42. Sometimes shortened to 'Problematic' by the lazy or spacially challenged.

Created by people who had far too much time on their hands who realised that with the exponential growth in the global population, there were going to be many more people with far too much time on their hands and only a finite amount of space in middle management and supermarket checkouts.
The problem-o-matic was conceived to provide questions for the excess population to puzzle over under the misconception that they were actually doing something productive and worthwhile.

Simple questions provided by the problem-o-matic such as 'Why do people do the things they do?' or 'What happens when you get a whole bunch of people in a confined space?', have led to the field of 'science' we have come to recognise as Psychology and Sociolgy.

Since it's inception, the Problem-o-matic has far outperformed it's initial design parameters. In fact, the field of philosophy has had to increase it's manpower by a factor of 10¹⁹ in order to try to understand just how the problem-o-matic arrived at the answer it did.

Further more, those same philosophers are employed to asses the answerss for the problem-o-matic.
You see, there is one slight problem with the problem-o-matic and that comes down to what is a good answer for it to question?
A bad answer, for example, is 'the mid-1950's' as it's clearly too vague to provide a reasonable question. Besides, what's the point in asking a question about a period that still exists in living memory, that's surely what senior citizens are for.
'Friday night, down the pub.' in another rather good example of a bad question, which, at different times gave the questions 'Why do people do the things they do?' and 'What happens when you get a whole bunch of people in a confined space?'. As a point of interest, the machine was provided answer was on a Friday evening just before 5:30 and Monday morning 9:05 respectively. Some Problemosiphers have suggested that due to their unusual construction the Problem-o-matics are susceptible to chronological influence; other, heavily discredited, problemosiphers have suggested that the machines may just be accurately empathic.
Either way, even subtle changes in the environment in which a problem-o-matic have demonstrated a significant change in the nature of the questions asked.

Operational Warning! The creators strongly prohibited anyone from using 'Problem-o-matic' itself as an answer, it's not that it would cause irreparable damage to the machine, rather they don't want you to know what they were doing that led to the conception of the device (but I didn't tell you that ;) ).


*sigh*, See what happens when you read the whole H2G2 pentrilogy in less than a fortnight?

Good lord. Do these people not know the existance of the word "problem?"

If I was editing that it wouldnt survive, authors be damned...bah!

.... whaaaaaaaa

o.O