RAY: This was a "Day in the Life of Raymond" puzzler and I said you don't need to know much about cars to get the answer, and that was a hint.

TOM: Well that's good because you don't know much about cars.

RAY: It's Monday morning. I show up at the shop and the phone's already ringing and it was an irate customer who we'll call Chuck. And he says, "My Volvo's out front. I had it towed back from New Hampshire over the weekend." Turns out he was up there to look at the foliage, and everything was going just fine when the car began to sputter and lose power. He noticed that the gas gauge happened to be on E, or close to it, so he pulls into a gas station and he gases up the car. Everything was great, he says, for about five miles and then the same thing started happening all over again. He noticed first on hills that it was having difficulty, and then on the flat he was having trouble, missing, bucking, losing power, and that's when he decided to give up and have it towed back to us.

Now, about a month or so before that, we had put a new fuel pump in his car, so Chuck says, "I'm pretty sure that that's what wrong and I don't know how it happened but the gas gauge isn't working anymore either, because when I filled it up the needle didn't move." And he suggests, although he never says it because he's a gentleman, that in addition to installing the fuel pump wrong, we probably broke the gas gauge, too.

So anyway, we verified that his car wouldn't start, in fact was not getting gas. When we turned the key there was spark, but when we put the fuel pressure tester on the fuel reel, the thing didn't even move. There wasn't even a pound of pressure. Ao after inspecting the fuel lines for cracks and whatnot and finding them OK, I concluded that Chuck was right and the fuel pump was bad.

But before I put a new one in I called Chuck on the phone and asked him to tell me the story again. He said, "I told you, it was running lousy, it was missing, losing power, I went to the gas station, I got gas, I drove away, it ran all right for four, five, I don't know, six miles, I don't know, then went right back to doing the same thing again."

And I said, "Aha," I asked him a question, he answered, yes. In ten minutes or less we had his car running like a top, and the gas gauge working, and the question is, what was the question that I asked Chuck.

As I said at the beginning, you didn't need to know very much about cars to this solve this. And in fact you don't.

TOM: That's a big hint.

RAY: And not only did I ask him a question which I already knew the answer to but I also told him what else he did. And the question was did you pay for the gas with a credit card. And he said, yes. And I said and while you were gassing up were you listening to your mother-in-law go on and on and on about how you should buy a new car, you shouldn't be such a cheapskate driving this old jalopy especially when you're taking her and her grandson all the way up to New Hampshire. And he said, yeah.

TOM: Um hm.

RAY: And what happened was the following. He didn't notice that when he put the nozzle in because his mother-in-law was running her mouth like she usually does that the thing shut off immediately. And in fact he put like 65 cents worth of gas in it.

TOM: How did you know that?

RAY: Well I knew that because the gas gauge read empty. So he went in with an empty tank and he left with essentially an empty tank having put in very little gas into it, and by not paying cash, if the attendant came over and said 65 cents, sir, he would have said, oh that can't be right, I'm on empty.

TOM: But if he just pulled a little slip out of the automatic machine ­-

RAY: Right, and he was just tired of listening to that mother-in-law of his. He just stuffed that thing in his pocket and off they went. He said, all those dopes, my gas gauge still doesn't work. So what we did very simply was put gas in it and off he went.

TOM: Did you charge him seven bucks a gallon?

RAY: And more. So who's our winner?

TOM: The winner is Millard Bockman from Euless, Texas. And for having his correct answer selected at random from all those answers that we got, Millard will get a 25-dollar gift certificate to the Shameless Commerce Division.

[ Car Talk Puzzler ]