One a day, plus iron

Yep. Not supposed to solve them. People get all weird if you solve them. If you solve them often enough, people get very weird. Nobody likes a smart-ass. You're also not supposed to know the punchlines to jokes or the last line of any limerick other than the Man from Nantucket one. You're not supposed to know how movies are going to come out by the end of the first half hour or so even though they generally give you enough information to solve the problem by then. You're not supposed to do those things and if you simply must, try not to do them very often or among people who don't already know you fairly well.

Clearly you were never in the summer of your seventh grade year and blowing an afternoon listening to a (six-years-older) friend's college-age boyfriend playing absolutely filthy songs on cassette. (Seriously. They were funny, in a sophomoric sort fo way and he was a sophomore in college. I figured it was all good. I harbor a huge soft spot for The Rodeo Song to this day.) That was quite entertaining until the tape got to the limerick-y part of things.

There was a young woman from Sader
Who had sex with an alligator.
We never knew
the result of that screw

There is only one line that tidily finishes this limerick. I'd never heard the damn thing before, but I knew what it had to be, how it had to come out. And so, with the guy on the tape, I said the last line. I was kind of chuffed that I'd gotten it totally and exactly right. And then I spent the next fifteen minutes feeling like some kind of freak because the aforementioned boyfriend wanted to know if I'd heard it before or if I was lying about not having heard it before to make myself seem smart or if I was really some kind of freak. While he wasn't mean about it or anything, he didn't believe me when I explained that it was clear as day what the line had to be.

Now, take that experience and repeat it about fifty times, in assorted settings and with different people. I'm not really sure what I was supposed to have gotten from the whole thing, other than the obvious: You're not supposed to solve the puzzles. If you don't solve the puzzles, don't know the punchlines, don't finish the limericks, don't know how the movies end... people do not think you're some kind of freak. You don't have to spend fifteen or twenty minutes explaining your damn self and trying to convince them that you're not lying about having had no prior experience with the thing. It's easy. It doesn't upset anyone. There's no staring.