My Day, as a Logic Puzzle

You're familiar with logic puzzles, right? Where you have some information, and you have to deduce the rest of the information in order to solve the problem? Here's an example:

Three men were standing in a row, all facing the same direction, so that there was one in back who could see the two in front of him, one in the middle, and one in front who could not see either of the other two. There were three blue and two red hats. One hat was placed on each man, without them seeing which two were left over. Each man was told the total number of each color of hat. First the man in the back was asked if he could deduce what color hat he had on, but he said he couldn't. Neither could the man in the middle, when he was next asked. But the man in the front, who could see neither of those behind him but could hear their answers, correctly deduced by logic what color hat he was wearing. What color was it and why?

Here's how my real-life logic puzzle situation came about today. Allen was at the airport, picking up a visiting team. He received a phone call from ShaRi at our mission, telling him that three of the team members had not made it onto the flight, and that they would need to fly in later. He needed some additional information, so ShaRi was going to get that, and call him right back.

But, he waited and waited, and received no call. His attempts to call ShaRi didn't work out either. So he called me at home, and asked me to place a call to ShaRi from our home phone, to find out what was going on. I called the number, and received a message saying that the call was being forwarded, and to leave a message. I called Allen, and told him I hadn't been successful in reaching ShaRi, but I would keep on trying. Not long after, ShaRi called me at the house. Although she had been trying to call Allen, it seemed to her that he wasn't answering his phone. Of course, I thought this was odd, as he had answered when I called him. Apparently, the calls from ShaRi were not getting through.

I suggested that ShaRi give me the message, and I would relay it to Allen. The message was that the missing team members had a new flight to Honduras, which was to board in 20 minutes, but they wouldn't board until they knew that someone would be at the airport waiting for them. I said I would relay the info to Allen, and call back with his response.

I called Allen, who said, "Yes, put them on the plane." But when I tried to call ShaRi, once again there was the forwarding/leave a message response. Apparently the message I had left previously hadn't made it to ShaRi, so I wasn't going to trust this urgently needed, time-sensitive info to the machine.

To resolve this dilemma, I used my ace-in-the-hole: my mother in Florida. She still gets me out of jams sometimes, just like when I used to miss the school bus or forget my lunch. I called her, very rapidly explained the situation, and asked her to place the call to ShaRi for me, from inside the US, to see if it would go through. If she got through, she could give ShaRi the message from Allen, regarding the team. I also asked Mom to call me back after placing the call, so I would know where things stood.

Then I called Allen, and told him that I was working on sending word to ShaRi. When I got off the phone with Allen, I decided to go ahead and call my mom back. It is much less expensive to call the US from Honduras, than it is to call the other way around, so I figured I'd save Mom some money.

When I reached Mom, she said that she had delivered the message to ShaRi, but then when she tried to call me she couldn't get through to me.

So, here's the logic problem:

If Allen at the airport needs to talk with ShaRi at the office, and Allen can't call ShaRi, and ShaRi can't get through to Allen, but ShaRi can call Trish even though Trish can't call ShaRi, and Mom can call ShaRi but can't call Trish or Allen, then how can we GET ANYTHING DONE AROUND HERE?

Happy news, though. It is almost midnight, and the entire team is now safe and sound at the hotel here in Gracias. Hurrah!

(The Logic Puzzle example quoted at the top is from this page. There is a link at the bottom of that page to the puzzle answers, in case you want to try it out.)