One of the great blessings of the Holy Ghost is to help us remember things (John 14:26). My patriarchal blessing states that I would be able to remember the things I learn in school and use them as I need them. Today was one such occasion.

I’m currently interviewing for a new job – mainly because Rachel wants to move down to Utah county, closer to her family and I don’t want to have to commute that far.

As I drove to my interview, I said a prayer while driving and asked for the Holy Ghost to help me remember things I have learned over the years.

In my interview, the first question that was asked of me was something like this:

Given a positive integer value greater, tell us how you would determine if that number was a multiple of 3 without using division or modulus.

Without really thinking that hard I rattle out. I would add all the digits in that number, and do it again with the resulting numbers until I had a one digit number. If that one digit number were 3, 6, or 9, then it would be a multiple of 3.

The two guys interviewing looked at me as if I’d fallen off my rocker, and said, “Huh? Can you explain that?”

I wrote an example on the board. They still seemed a bit skeptical. I explained it was a neat trick I remember learning in 6th grade. One of the guys started rattling out scenarios and finally said, “Well, I guess that could be true.” The other guy that asked the question just said, “Well, that’s much simpler than my solution, so let’s just move on to the next question.”

Unfortunately the next two problems I got didn’t quite go as smoothly as I struggled through them. Hopefully the first problem was my saving grace though. 🙂