Comment by ggreer

9 years ago

I hate to be that person, but I doubt the story is true. The variance in time spent waiting in the checkout line is far greater than the time it takes to walk to the front vs back of the store.

What do you know? I google "snopes car allergic to ice cream" and find that it's an urban legend: http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/icecream.asp

30 comments

ggreer

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Itsdijital  9 years ago

It's not that far fetched though.

I had a an old motorcycle years ago that was the same way as this guy's car. If I stopped to grab a snack, my bike would not start again. If I stopped for lunch, then it would fire back up no problem. Sure enough the problem was vapor lock. However the time needed for the bike to cool enough was about 15-20 minutes, not the couple minutes mentioned in this story.

  • StavrosK  9 years ago

    It's definitely a thing that can happen, just not in the time frames mentioned here. 5 minutes for a snack vs 30 minutes for dinner sounds plausible, 3 minutes for vanilla vs 4 minutes for chocolate does not.

  • GoToRO  9 years ago

    We used a two stroke atv. My father would go to the store (2km) and come back, no problem. I would go to get water from a spring (7km) and the engine would just die after about 4km. It turns out that the gas mixture was too light and the engine was overheating, but only after 4km of continuous run.

JoeAltmaier  9 years ago

Ok how about: had the car detailed, cleaned and new floor mats. Filters and fluids replaced. Tires rotated. In a super-service place. Paid and went to the parking lot - car wouldn't start. Not even a click. Just nothing.

What could it be? Nothing that was done was related to ignition or electrical systems at all. Yet it wouldn't start.

<spoiler> the new floor mats were too thick. Couldn't push the clutch down far enough, and this manual car you had to have the clutch in to enable the ignition. Just nudged the new mat back, problem solved.

jsight  9 years ago

Yeah, I doubted the veractiy as well. Fortunately this is a story that still works even if taken non-literally.

omginternets  9 years ago

That's really missing the point of the s/story/parable.

  • vilhelm_s  9 years ago

    "Moral of the story: even insane-looking problems are sometimes real."

    Isn't it relevant to note that this problem was not real? It seems to kind of undermine the point if the author did not know of any insane-looking problem that was actually real, and had to make one up...

    • omginternets  9 years ago

      No, it really doesn't.

      If you're hung up on the fact that the story isn't real, it means you aren't thinking about the moral of the story. You're focusing on the wrong thing despite the fact that the insight is being spoon-fed to you...

      Incidentally (though respectfully... really!), this is a textbook example of pedantry, and it's the bane of our profession.

      More to the point, fiction often points to truth in ways non-fiction cannot.

      10 replies →

    • laumars  9 years ago

      I've seen and read lots of parables that end with the phrase "moral of the story" when distilling down the core lesson behind the tail for the convenience of the audience. Moreover, the term "story" doesn't necessitate factual content - it's generally used more to convey an entertainment piece of which the content could either be factual or entirely fictional.

cooper12  9 years ago

Eh, that's just your assumption. It's a guy in a fine neighborhood going to the store after dinner. For all we know the store is (excuse the pun) deserted at that point.

disordinary  9 years ago

Also, he's not always getting only Ice Cream I'm sure, he's going to be grabbing other stuff, which depending on what he needs to get is going to create variable times (not to mention the length of the queue).

Driving to the store every night for Ice Cream seems like a waste of time, unless he really needs to get out of the house.

kripy  9 years ago

The only urban legend here is the fact that Snopes is somehow running Active Server Pages.