This time, with rules.
The other post got me thinking, here’s my version.
For 5 million dollars, the task is the hide a paperclip in your home from a professional investigator. You have 15 minutes to hide it, they have 12 hours and subcontractors to find it. You cannot leave your house or have anything shipped in during your 15 minutes. You have to leave immediately after the 15 minutes is up, and you cannot have the paperclip on your person. Any family members, friends, and all pets will also be removed from the premises, and they aren’t allowed to have the paperclip.
You must be able to produce the original paperclip at the end in order to win the challenge. It is marked in some way that you don’t know but the investigator can verify. Absolutely no substitutions. You can bend the paperclip, but not cut it.
The paperclip must be inside the building. Not in a shared entryway, not outside the walls in any way. Between the studs of the outside walls of whatever you own or rent as living space are as far as you can go.
Any damage done by the investigator or subcontractors will be repaired back the way it was at no charge, win or lose. They are not allowed to harm the structural integrity of your home/apartment.
Straighten the paper clip and slip it inside the binding of an old copy of Britannica I have. I got it second hand from a public library, so it has quite a few of the old style anti-theft tags hidden throughout; it also contains quite a few paper clips of many colors I once used as bookmarks.
I use the remaining time to clean the house, making sure to go into the bathroom more than once, moving the toilet tank lid and opening and shutting all of the cabinets every time. If I’m very lucky I’ll be just shutting the medicine cabinet audibly when the investigators walk in. (For those not familiar, many houses built in the mid 20th century in the US had slots in the back of the medicine cabinet where you were supposed to dispose of used razor blades.)
I think they’d tear the entire house apart trying to find that thing. There’s a small chance someone would notice paper clips on the Brittanica and start checking for more. Whether they find it depends on whether they have access to x rays or a metal detector.
I have no doubt that they would, but that’s not one of the variables I’m trying to control. As far as I can tell, time and volume are the only two things that I can play with. They have a 30-minute timer, and cannot take the load-bearing walls down. That means there’s a volume constraint, no matter how many people they have available they can only fit so many in one space. That limits the amount of time they have to actually search, assuming they empty the dwelling. If they don’t empty the dwelling, it sharply limits the number of people they can have searching at any one time. Heavy equipment like an x-ray machine also limits that volume.
With respect to the Britannica, if you’re familiar with them you know they are massive and this one just happened to be my primary research source in high school. I cannot understate the number of flags and paper clips simply destroying those bindings right now. If someone does notice it, I’m relying on running out the clock with them checking every one they see first.
They’d have to stay within the home, but they do have 12 hours to check through things. So, they cannot empty the things to the outside, they have to sort through things inside. I guess that eliminates the xray idea.
But a metal detector and 12 hours time would put the odds in their favor.