I have asked this question to countless people (mostly in hair salons) as an alternative to small talk, and it always yields interesting results.
Rules:
- You get the money right now, right where you are. If it’s 10pm and you’re in the middle of nowhere, your money will still go poof at 11pm.
- As a result of the above, tell us what time it is and roughly where you are (big city, desert, small town, …)
- You must spend the money. You cannot give it to someone to hold on to it for you for a while.
- Normal world rules apply, e.g. you cannot buy a $250k car at a dealership in 1h in cash, and you cannot buy a house in 1h either.
- Remember that getting from where you are to the place you need to go takes time. Factor that in!
Edit: I’m glad you guys had fun with this one. Feel free to post similar hypothetical questions. I kinda like these.
Edit edit: Free advertising 😅 --> I run and maintain an open source push notification service called ntfy, which let’s you send notifications to your phone via PUT/POST, like curl -d "backup successful" ntfy.sh/mytopic. Go check it out.
Too many answers trying to game the system. Have fun with it!
If this was earlier in the day, I would drive to a pinball arcade that is maybe 40 minutes away, and offer them the entire million for every pinball machine they had. Hopefully the owner could be contacted and close the deal within the remaining 20 minutes.
I wish there would be time to buy a boat. I know nothing about sailing or maintaining a boat, but I would love to just drive to a marina and just get a 50 foot sailing boat.
BTW, of they ask why I’m in such a hurry, I’ll say I have a Brewster’s Millions situation and hope they’d seen the movie. We could relax after the deal was done.