January 29: National Puzzle Day

I love puzzles.  Solving things using logical deductions is my jam.  Justin is a fan as well, but in a different sort of way, which I will delight in explaining momentarily.  Because of that, we both figured that National Puzzle Day would be an insane orgy of puzzling madness.  Except here's the thing - Puzzle Day landed on a Wednesday and we both did a metric shit-ton of work and were exhausted.

We both did a few puzzles, but found joy in celebrating how puzzles appear in our daily lives instead of going out of our way to do additional puzzles.  Is that a total cop-out?  Yeah.  Yeah it is.  But this isn't your project so back the hell off.

BOOM.

So let's talk about the puzzles we encountered in our daily lives.  For those who don't know, in the last few months I moved onto the compensation team at my company.  We're the team responsible for determining how people get paid, what their level is, how the bonuses work etc...  So, you know, don't piss us off.  Actually, you're welcome to piss me off.  I have literally no control over the outcome of any of those decisions.  Not unlike my previous role, I am a data rat and I LOVE it.  My entire day is one big logic puzzle.  I take thousands of lines of data and make them make sense to other people.  It is amazing.

Also, I work on improving processes - which is the best puzzle there is.  Here is process improvement - the crash course: "we do things one way, but we're pretty sure we can do it better/faster/cheaper - so - fix it".  There is SO MUCH FREEDOM to just logic the shit out of it.  It makes my brain scream like a Baby Boomer at a Beatles concert.

Back when music was music.

Justin's puzzling experience was a bit more leisurely than mine - games that involve puzzles are one of his primary hobbies.  Remembering that I already admitted we copped-out a little - Justin played some games he really enjoys and we looked for puzzle type aspects to them.  The first was Pokemon something-or-other, which I previously knew nothing about through very deliberate action on my part.  Now I understand it a little.  So - there are this little freaky creatures and there's this child labor situation where kids catch them and train them to fight in a totally non-barbaric game version of cock fighting.  BUT - if you ignore the back-story, you can see the puzzles in the game.  Each of the fights requires the right choice of captured and broken (sorry, I mean trained) animal and the right choice of combat moves.

The other game he played was Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.  There are a ton of mini-puzzles along the way of the quest.  Within each section of each map there are multiple times the character has to jump on the right bricks or find the right switch or gather certain things in a certain order.  It is one big multi-level puzzle, but at least it finally pays off in the end.

...or not...

I also did a couple of rounds of Sudoku on my phone before calling it a night.  The double-edged sword of loving a job that is one giant and constant puzzle is that the end of the day can be pretty tiring.  And Justin so very sweetly takes care of me so we both kind of took the night off together.  Puzzle Day was a lot of fun and it was a neat thought exercise to look at things we do every day and see how they work the same part of the brain as puzzle games.