Grapes and Lemons

When most people need answers, they ask Google. So where do Google engineers get answers to our questions? Well, that's why we have whiteboards.

At Google, a whiteboard is a communal free-association machine. For example, suppose I were to write on the whiteboard, "What is the answer to life?" Within 5 minutes, someone would walk by and write below it, "42." That's just how whiteboards work.

A few months ago, on my way to get a cup of coffee, I stopped to write this:

Q: What's purple and commutes?

In the time it took me to fill my cup and return, someone had already written below it:

A: An Abelian grape.
Q: What's yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice?

Cute. But no time to respond; time for meetings. The next time I walked past the whiteboard, a third person had written below that:

A: Zorn's Lemon.
Q: What's an anagram for Banach-Tarski?

Now I had never heard of that last joke. Fortunately, I learned the answer an hour later, from a fourth person's handwriting:

A: Banach-Tarski Banach-Tarski

Then, below that, in a fifth style of handwriting:

I don't get it. What's Banach-Tarski?

And you can probably guess what was below that:

A: Google it

And that's how Googlers ask questions. Credit goes to Michael in the comments for reminding me of that exchange.