"Riddle"

So I saw a "riddle" on social media the other day that went something like this.

There's a beautiful woman who is being courted by two men, a doctor and a bus driver. The bus driver has to drive across the country for a week, after which he is planning on proposing to the woman. Before he leaves, he gives her seven apples. Why?

Now this is only a "riddle" in the sense that the answer is deliberately obscured. But it cannot be arrived at logically, which is why I keep using quotes around the word "riddle." It's actually worse than those bad wordplay questions masquerading as "riddles," which I didn't think was possible to be honest.

But let's go ahead and apply both logic and a working cultural knowledge to this "riddle," shall we? The answer, in case you aren't up on your 50's era pithy clichés, is "because an apple a day keeps the doctor away," suggesting that if the woman eats an apple every day, she won't run off with the doctor before the driver gets back.

Which is patently ridiculous for a number of reasons. First off,  that saying is related to health, not some kind of repellent effect apples have on anyone who went to medical school. Doctors are not inherently allergic to apples, and won't dissolve if you spritz them with apple juice. Rigorous testing and several restraining orders has shown this to be true.

Since it's not like the doctor is only seeing this woman on health-based checkup terms (I assume, based on really zero helpful context), helping her stay healthy isn't going to keep this particular doctor away.

But even if the bus driver has some kind of superstitious misunderstanding about what the whole apples saying even means, this is still a terrible way to act on that belief. If the woman doesn't like apples, she'll just put them at home or throw them away, and she'd still be able to see the doctor. But what if she really likes apples and eats them all the first day? There goes the rest of the week.

And do apples keep doctors away the same way garlic keeps vampires away? Because in that case she'd have to wear the apple around her neck on a string, which, and you can quote me on this, is probably not a reasonable expectation of your girlfriend.

But feel free to ask. Let me know how that goes.

A better solution would be to give her seven large lockets that each have a sliver of apple in them and ask her to wear one every day, and then hope she doesn't open one up and realize there's a chunk of fruit slowly spoiling in there. And all things considered, if he's relatively sure she'll say yes, why not just propose to her before he leaves? In the immortal words of Beyoncé, "all the single ladies, all the single ladies."

(Yes, I'm sure. Why, what line did you think I was referring to?)

In any case, this action displays either a fundamental misunderstanding of social cues, or a willingness to act on superstition that might turn out to be behaviorally crippling in the future. Either would be an excellent reason for the woman to dump the driver and focus on the doctor. Or the whole thing was a tongue-in-cheek inside joke between the two of them.

In which case it probably wasn't suitable for wide-spread social media distribution. Think before you post.
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