January 2, 2025. 7:30pm.
This past summer my wife and I bought a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle and we finally got around to opening the box earlier this week. Is this really supposed to be considered fun entertainment?
Neither of us have assembled a jigsaw puzzle since childhood, but the process wasn’t what we remembered. We looked for the end-pieces first. Having each man-handled and inspected about 970 pieces, we managed to assemble about twenty percent of the puzzle border. I then tried sorting pieces by color, and soon realized that practically every piece had a minimum of three colors making it too tedious to sort using that method. And then the color variations. There was dark blue, light blue, sea blue, ocean blue, and probably a half-dozen more colors that could best be described by referencing a Sherwin-Williams paint sample card. And last, we regretted attempting to assemble a puzzle on a tablecloth because of the difficulty in sliding and maneuvering pieces around without having to pick and place each one individually.
Over three days we spent a total of five hours in near silence sitting across from one another in deep concentration. And what did we have to show for it? A puzzle I’d estimate was only seven percent complete.
“How is this fun?” one of us eventually asked the other. “It’s not,” we both concurred. “It’s like we’re doing work!” It even took me a full ten minutes to disassemble and scoop up all the pieces, but I’ve now re-boxed the puzzle and placed it in the Goodwill donation pile.
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