While I appreciate your point, I think anyone who has spent sufficient time troubleshooting complex systems has dealt with similar types of problems, and can grasp the _spirit_ of the story.

In fact, I'd argue the quaint style of the story does geeks a favor: if it's appealing to normies, maybe they'll appreciate us technical folks' perspective a little more.

actually the story is detrimental to helping people understand how technical systems and troubleshooting work, because it's so poorly invented.

lots of people, both technical professionals, and non-engineers who are observant and have an appropriate level of belief in causality, troubleshoot transient failures like this all the time. a difference in the amount of time between shutting down the engine and starting it up is one of the first things that someone like this would test, or control for. it's beyond implausible that the second time the guy got vanilla (after riding along for 4 trips, two long and two short), the engineer didn't raise the question of how long he was in the store.

people troubleshoot things like this by being able to separate causes which are plausible, although unlikely and surprising, from things which aren't remotely plausible. the 500-mile email story and the stories above about sunlight interfering with sensors demonstrate this.

if you're the sort of person who believes that the type of ice cream you get might affecting your car's ignition - the type of person who buys ice cream often but never thinks about how long the errand takes, you simply never get the point of being able to make a pattern between those two things. the second time your car doesn't start, you blame it on the scratch-off lottery ticket you won $2 on which used up your supply of luck for the day. the third time, you conclude that the car ignition knew you were late and likes to choose its failures to cause maximum annoyance. and the fourth time, you realize that your mother-in-law gave your car the evil eye that morning.

the story as told, especially when presented as a real parable about engineering rather than an amusing myth, is frankly insulting to the other type of person. the untrained, not necessarily educated person who cares about machines and believes in material reality. the person who starts checking their watch each time they go to the store and a couple of weeks later is telling their mechanic friend "if it's more than 3 minutes or so, it's fine. but if you try and start it before 2 minutes, then you have to wait another 5 before it's ready to go".

Also ridiculously implausible is that the supermarket keeps vanilla ice cream in a completely different location in the store.

Aisle caps commonly feature a product that would ordinarily be found alongside a bunch of closely-related products somewhere else in the store. But I don't think I've ever seen a refrigerated aisle cap.

Obviously, they'd put the most popular flavor way at the back of the store, and the least popular flavors at the front. The store is not in the business of maximizing throughput of customers - quite the opposite, they want customers to spend more time walking and getting lost between shelves, as this maximizes the amount of wares moved.

I believe the aisle caps are bid for, and then arranged by, the manufacturers. The store just sells them the space.

The manufacturer is unlikely to see a problem with putting a display of very popular products right at the front of the store where people can't help but see it.

So you think Vanilla Inc, the company that only makes vanilla flavor ice cream, is paying for a whole chiller that they fill with vanilla, since all the other flavors are not as popular?

Or perhaps, unbeknownst to everyone in the world who uses the word 'vanilla' to mean 'mundane', vanilla ice cream actually enjoys far higher profit margins than all other ice cream.

No, I think Dreyers, the company that makes ice cream, uses the limited space available in the aisle cap to showcase one or two of their most popular flavors. (Or one or two flavors that are seasonally relevant.) That's a totally normal use of the aisle cap, just like how a Triscuits aisle cap is all original Triscuits and the many secondary flavors that Triscuits come in have to be found in the crackers aisle.

It would be literally impossible for an aisle cap to feature every ice cream flavor available - there are so many that each flavor would have very little representation in the display, and the concept would fall apart as soon as anyone bought something from it. At that point, you're paying a bunch of extra money to send the message "check out our least popular flavors".

> At that point, you're paying a bunch of extra money to send the message "check out our least popular flavors".

That's what I expect them to do, though. The most popular flavors, by definition, needs advertising the least.

The most popular flavors, by definition, benefit from advertising the most. The goal isn't to achieve equality of popularity between every product you sell. It's to sell the greatest number of products!

The advertising costs the same whether you advertise popular flavors or unpopular ones, but you'll get a lot more sales by advertising the popular ones.

Go check out a grocery store, see whether the aisle caps slant towards popular or unpopular product varieties.

It's unclear whether you're claiming 1. the vanilla ice cream is sometimes kept in a separate chiller must nearer the entrance and this obviously made-up story is perfectly true, 2. at least some stores exist where the vanilla ice cream (and only the vanilla) is kept in a separate chiller must nearer the entrance, or 3. the vanilla being kept by itself in a separate chiller has elements of plausibility, and can not be dismissed out of hand, even though it's possible that this specific set-up has never existed in any actual store in real life, ever. Which is it?

If you read my comments before deciding you needed to respond to them, it would be pretty apparent that I am claiming none of those things. I specifically noted that a refrigerated aisle cap is implausible.

What's not implausible is the idea that one flavor of a product with several flavors might be located far away from all the other flavors. That happens all the time.

..nor would the featured product simply be one flavor of ice cream, as opposed to, say, all the Ben & Jerry's.

LEGEND: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/

And having a stranger along for the shopping trip doesn't affect the timing more than the extra walk to the back of the store?

And the engineer is sitting in the car on the first night and it "wouldn't start," which signals the end of the episode for the day. Were they stranded? Did the car start after a few tries, which would have given a huge hint about the root cause? Surely the engineer who had reproduced the issue would quickly narrow it down by running diagnoses on the car itself.

But the family dynamics are the most improbable part here. How does the family have this predictable routine and not simply stock up on ice cream? The family has enough kids that the consume a whole $unit of ice cream per day. So with that much chaos in the house, how does the dad justify going out for a drive after dinner when the chaos of family multi-tasking (cleanup, chores, homework, bedtime) is at its peak? "Oh, look. Out of ice cream again. I'll be back in a few!"