I still wonder what time it was when those two trains crossed.

You know the ones. We met them in third-grade math class story problems:

“A train leaves the station in Chicago at 3 p.m., headed to Cleveland, at an average speed of 47 mph. Another train leaves Cleveland at 4 p.m. for Chicago at an average speed of 53 mph. If the distance between the two stations is 350 miles, at what time will they pass each other?”

Why? Is someone on the Chicago train going to hand off a football to someone hanging off the Cleveland train?

And what about the time zones? If it’s 3 p.m. in Chicago, it’s 4 p.m. in Cleveland. These trains are leaving at the exact same time! Do I lose points if I ignore Eastern Time vs. Central Time?

Remember back in third grade when your teacher cheerfully announced, “Let’s do some story problems for fun! Won’t that be fun?” And your buddy Inigo muttered, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

In a classic Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, Calvin reads in his math book: “Mr. Jones lives 50 miles away from you. You both leave home at 5 o’clock and drive toward each other. Mr. Jones travels at 35 mph, and you drive at 40 mph. At what time will you pass Mr. Jones on the road?”

Calvin, proclaiming how he always catches on to these trick questions, scribbles: “Given the traffic around here at 5 o’clock, who knows?”

A popular meme expresses how adults remain traumatized all these years later over simple story problems:

“Q: If you have four pencils and I have seven apples, how many pancakes will fit on the roof? A: Purple, because aliens don’t wear hats.”

But it wasn’t just cars and trains set on collision courses between New York and Los Angeles. Story problems also dealt with topics like sharing candy, losing a balloon, buying insane amounts of fruits and vegetables, cows per acre, and how much older/younger you are than siblings and friends.

The idea was to give real-world experience and to show how math solves problems of everyday life, such as, “Q: Billy bought 45 Snickers bars. He eats 37. What does he have now? A: Diabetes. And three cavities.”

Or, “Dog math: If I have three bones and Mr. Jones takes away two, how many fingers will he have left?”

Then there were the story problems that started like this: “For her birthday party, Sally bought 60 cantaloupes…”

Stop! I refuse to go to a cantaloupe-themed birthday party. Maybe watermelon, but 60? We were third-graders. On bicycles.

Was Sally some kind of cantaloupe runner? “Psst, buddy, wanna buy a cantaloupe, cheap? They came on a train that left the station in Los Angeles at 3:48 a.m. and traveled at an average speed of 47 mph on the same track as a train that left Chicago. They crashed at 8:17 a.m., and cantaloupes flew everywhere. Give ya a real good deal on ’em.”

I once passed a car with what must have been 50 helium balloons jammed in the back. Suddenly, the wind sucked two balloons out one of the windows. Which meant, if the driver had 50 balloons and the wind took two…

I gasped. “That’s the guy our math books warned us about! He’s real!”

On behalf of adults everywhere still in therapy over Farmer Jones and his 12 acres of corn, three acres of beets, and four acres of cows, I’d like to say, “Hey, Math! Grow up and solve your own problems. Stop multiplying mine.”

• Solve Cole’s problem-filled stories at burtseyeview@tribtoday.com, the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook or www.burtonwcole.com.