The Tao of the New York Times Crossword Puzzle

The Tao of the New York Times Crossword Puzzle

By Kelly Sargent

Before I married Paul, I dated a man from Long Island for four years, definitely one of your longer long distance relationships since I live in Iowa.  Ken loved working the New York Times crossword puzzle almost more than anything in life except flying planes.  Personally, I wasn’t interested, but because he took the puzzle so seriously, I felt moved when we were together to join him in his hobby as best I could as a gesture of solidarity, if not concrete help.

It seemed to please Ken when I participated, and he always strove to be as diplomatic as possible in telling me that my contributions were totally bogus.  He explained that there was a certain knack to working the NYTCP, jokes within jokes and clues within clues that only someone who’d solved a great many of them would catch.

We had one final and memorable puzzle mishap.  It was a beautiful, fall Sunday afternoon and Ken was once again working THE PUZZLE as I tried to assist in some small way.  After hacking away at it for a long time, we reached an impasse, a kind of a clot.  At the center of it was a clue word that neither one of us knew the meaning of.   We had tried to get at the answer from the clues that crisscrossed it, but we were getting nowhere.  My brain began to permanently cramp, so I resigned my position as co-puzzler.  However, in the struggle to solve the thing, I had gotten darn curious as to what that mystery word meant.

Little did I suspect on what dangerous ground I trod by wanting to know.   Ken, you see, had definite rules about how the puzzle could and couldn’t be solved.  The most important one was that absolutely no reference materials were ever allowed under any circumstance.  I knew the rules and abided by them, and I had no intention of spoiling his game.  I just wanted to know what that word meant for my own edification.  I promised, cross-my-heart, not to tell him.  He could continue to assault that puzzle ad infinitum exactly in accordance with his rules, no harm, no foul.  

Unfortunately, I was caught consulting the dictionary and Ken was furious with me.  This wasn’t a relationship that was meant to be.

Fast forward to my present life, happily married to Paul.  Somewhere along the line during our ten years together I had begun dabbling with the New York Times crossword which appears in the Des Moines Register.  I have no idea when or why I began fiddling with it sans Ken.  It certainly wasn’t fond memories of golden hours spent arm in arm unraveling puzzles together.

Despite my unsuccessful tandem-puzzling past, without necessarily intending to, I got Paul involved.  It probably started by my asking him if he knew a four-letter word for heraldic shade or what the official tender of ancient Babylon was or some such other obscurity.  Since there isn’t a lot we don’t share, this wasn’t a remarkable turn of events, except that Paul had what I would call an aversion to crossword puzzles.

It’s not that he wasn’t capable of solving them per se; he’s well and broadly read, a science whiz, trained musician, geography buff and blessed with innate linguistic ability.  Despite being so gifted, Paul dwelt under the misapprehension that he wasn’t a person who was capable of “finishing things,” a label that had been pinned on him by his family when he was young.  All of us tend to live up or down to the expectations of the important people in our lives, and that was no less true for Paul.  As a result, he had spent the time before we met avoiding getting started on life because he didn’t want to take on anything he might not be able to finish, including a crossword puzzle.

My M.O. was just the opposite.  Equally distrustful and perjorative of myself, I compensated by purposely taking on things because they were difficult and then forcing myself to finish them not because I necessarily liked what I was doing, but because I’d started it — whatever IT was.  Although such dogged persistence perhaps sounds admirable, it was really just plain nutty, like anything taken to an extreme.  There I would be slogging away at a book I loathed just because I’d read the first chapter.   A saner person would realize that one really can’t judge a book by it’s cover and give herself permission to try it and decide to read it — OR NOT!

When we started dabbling with the puzzle, we didn’t often finish one.  This not-finishing was progress for me, only slightly mitigated by the fact that I saved all the unfinished ones for later completion — recently I found a drawerful — and tackling one at all was new behavior for Paul.  We kept playing with the puzzle every now and again, without particularly noticing that as the months rolled by, we were getting decidedly better at it.  Of course, our rules were different than Ken’s — we didn’t have any.  We’d work on the puzzle together or individually, and reference materials were allowed anytime either one of us reached our personal frustration limit.

Over time I gradually became aware that we had gotten to be rather whiz-bangish at solving them.  Paul said he knew we’d achieved a new level of puzzlehood when we brought the thing with us on a trip and, moreover, solved it from start to finish during the two-hour wait for our connecting flight with no references available.  

Late one night not so long ago, Paul and I were working on the puzzle in bed.  I was rapidly fading, but Paul kept urging me onward.  “Come on, we can finish this!”  Finally I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, and as I drifted off to sleep I marveled at how markedly Paul’s interest in and attitude toward the puzzle had changed.  He had gone from being creeped out by it to being loathe to put it down.

This thing he had avoided because he didn’t believe in his ability to finish it, had become an enjoyable, invigorating challenge which enabled him to appreciate his own intelligence and mastery.  Paul had changed how he felt about the puzzle, but much more importantly, the puzzle had changed how he felt about himself.

Since this realization, I’ve been wondering what I might have gained from the puzzle besides a larger vocabularly.  This is my list of what I’ve learned about life from THE PUZZLE.

1)  People can get better at things.  

Paul and I improved dramatically at solving the puzzle without specifically setting out with that as a goal.  I find that hopeful and comforting because it allows me to imagine that right this very minute I might be getting better at other things without realizing it and so might everyone else.  Collectively, maybe that will make the world a better place to be.

2)  Perseverance pays off.  

Paul and I got better at the puzzle simply because we kept at it.  It’s like driving to California — it’s a long way from Iowa, but if you point yourself in the right direction and keep going, eventually you get there.  An awful lot of what gets done in the world is the result of putting one foot in front of the other, instead of the exercise of genius.

3)  Things that seem insoluble and hopeless aren’t necessarily.  

Boy howdy, did that puzzle seem completely impossible when I first tried to “contribute” with Ken.  It seemed like a conundrum which could not be solved by anyone, most especially me.  Every once in awhile when I pick up the new puzzle, I still look at it and think, “Well this is impossible.“  But it isn’t; Paul and I eventually crack each one.  Maybe that means the human race can figure out how to cure the incurable, resolve the unresolvable, and problems which seem to go on forever, won’t.

4)  Small achievements add up.  

Sometimes when I run through the puzzle for the first time I hardly know any answers at all, and I wonder how we can possibly unravel it with so little to go on.  But then Paul goes through it and finds that my three small answers have given him enough of a hint to solve one or two more clues and bit by bit from such humble beginnings we solve the puzzle.  The world we live in so complex that often it seems as though there’s little any one person can do to make a positive impact because we feel too insignificant to the sum of the mass.  The puzzle reminds me that small actions can be added layer upon layer to yield meaningful results.

5)  No matter how much you know, everyone knows something you don’t. 

Paul is great at geography, math, music, science, and foreign language questions, and I’m good at art, architecture, history and pop culture.  Every week we prove that pooling our knowledge and experience gets us farther than we would get individually.  Every single person on the planet knows some you don’t which makes humility not only a realistic worldview but an important survival skill.

6)  There’s more than one way to look at almost everything.  

Sometimes Paul and I arrive at the end of the puzzle lacking a single letter — and it’s apparent that the missing letter is a vowel!  Now how could this be anything but a slam dunk?  If you’re down to filling in a single vowel, let’s face it, you’ve only got a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y to choose from!  Nevertheless, there we are stymied.  Sooner or later, however, the dawn breaks and we realize that the problem is how we’d been interpreting the clue.  We’d been thinking of it only as a noun instead of an adjective or a verb instead of an adverb, or we had defined it in the way we were most familiar with, instead of considering the other five definitions.  It’s so easy for all of us to think that how we see things is the way things ARE, but everything in life depends on your perspective.

7)  Trust your instincts.  

Now and then there’s a puzzle that I literally don’t know where to begin because I don’t seem to know anything at all about anything in it.  I’ve learned though, that if I let my mind relax, hunches begin to percolate up from my subconscious.  I’ll get a glimpse, or a fragment, or a sort of fuzzy idea — almost more feeling than thought.  If I allow those feelings to go their own way unhindered and undirected, often the answer presents itself.  Our subconscious minds usually know way more than our conscious minds do, if we can just get quiet enough to listen.

8) If you wait until you’re sure about everything, you might not ever do anything.  

Paul and I eventually get to the place in every puzzle where we’ve filled in everything we know and the remaining questions are either things we don’t know or things we’re not too sure about.  A five-letter word for overfill might be “crowd” or it might be “flood,” but without any intersecting answers to literally clue us in, we can’t tell for sure which it is.  We can remain frozen in uncertainty and ultimately not finish the puzzle, or we can take a chance and make our best guess.  Not knowing exactly what to do is never an excuse for making no effort at all.

9)  When you’re frustrated and tired, step away.  

Paul and I often reach a point where thinking harder just isn’t going to help, so we put the puzzle away for awhile.  When we pick it up later, I’m always amazed at how many answers we get after having been completely deadlocked.  There’s a difference between being persistent and beating your head — or someone else’s — against the wall.  Stepping back helps everyone think clearer.

10)  It’s okay to get help.  

Sometimes Paul and I come to a section of the puzzle for which every remaining clue is something we’ve really never heard of before and the result is a knot we cannot untie by ourselves.  If we’ve tried all week to get at the answers from literally every direction on our own and nothing is forthcoming, we prefer to enlist the aid of reference materials rather than not solve the puzzle.  It’s better to own up to not knowing all the answers, get information from sources that do and as a result actually learn something instead of remaining ignorant.

11) Mistakes are part of going forward.  

The only person who hasn’t scratched out, marked over, whited out or erased on a New York Times crossword puzzle, is someone who hasn’t done one.  A “mistake” is the recognition of having found a better way to do something.  The only way to avoid making them, is to never do anything in life at all.

12)  You can learn something from every situation.  Who imagined that there were so many life lessons contained in a crossword puzzle?  I didn’t start fiddling with the New York Times crossword because I thought it would lead to greater widsom and self-knowledge.  It just worked out that way.  If we’re paying attention, there’s something to be learned evey moment.  How much, is up to us.

Trade Show Tips #2 - Working with Show Services and Labor

Dealing with show services is probably one of the least attractive aspects of exhibiting, yet it’s a real necessity. Lean on your exhibit house for more info regarding these issues.  It's our job to stay current on how things are done!

1. Read the exhibitor service manual

The exhibitor service manual is the official guide to everything the exhibitor needs to know about the show: all the relevant information, rules and regulations, service forms, registration, show promotions, contractor and shipping information. Remember to observe all deadlines.

2. Know what services you need

Know which products you are planning to demonstrate and display, and what utilities are required (and how much), make decisions on carpeting, furniture, colour schemes, cleaning and security services. Services ordered on the show floor could result in 50% additional costs.

3. Understand the floor plan

Carefully evaluate your display layout on the floor plan in relation to traffic flow and how your display will be effected. Understand every marking, however small and insignificant, as it indicates ceiling heights, pillar locations, etc.

4. Identify utility sources

Always order more utilities than you think you’ll need so your products perform at their optimum level.

Call the electrical department to find out how much power to order and where the utility ports are located in relation to your space. Display your products where they are least affected by unsightly wires or pipes. Always order more utilities than you think you’ll need so your products perform at their optimum level.

5. Understand drayage

Drayage involves delivering your display materials to the assigned space, removing empty crates, returning the crates at the end of the show and delivering the re-crated materials to the carrier loading dock. To save money,consolidate all shipments and ship one time.

6. Have enough carpeting

Make sure all your utilities are installed before laying the carpet to avoid the frustration of having to cut the carpet for electrical outlets. Order enough carpet to cover the bare concrete strip between the display and the aisle.

7. Allow extra time for customs

If your company is shipping products to overseas locations, allow extra time for various customs clearance procedures. Items will need the correct documentationand will often need to be physically inspected. Always use a customhouse broker or freight forwarder to coordinate all arrangements and keep you informed.

8. Get to know the show services representatives

The show services representatives can be your best friends. They often have the answers to many of your questions or problems. Remember, their job is to help you.

9. Work with union labor (where applicable)

Every city/country is different regarding union rules. Read the service manual carefully to familiarize yourself with what is and is not permissible. Any questions should be directed to show management or the service contractor. Consider hiring your exhibiting display house to provide set-up supervision.

10. Carry all relevant paperwork

Remember to bring copies of all relevant paperwork, especially plans, service orders, tracking numbers for all shipments, as well as important contact names, phone and fax numbers (when the original arrangements were made by another staff member).

Trade show tips #1 - picking the right show

Selecting the right trade show to attend can make a big difference to your success level, qualified leads and sales versus spending money, time and energy with no return.
1. Ask Questions
The first questions you should be asking are "who do you want to reach at the show?" and "what do you want to have happen?"
2. Identify shows
There are two groups of shows you should be evaluating: the shows you are presently attending, and the shows you want to consider for future participation. Who is your target market and which shows do they attend?
3. Match your objectives
Selecting the right shows means matching your show exhibiting objectives with the right target audiences, the right timing to meet buyers' purchasing patterns and the ability to show and demonstrate your products/services.
4. Do your homework
When evaluating a shows potential, gather as much information as possible show statistics/demographics and review lists of previous participants. Verify information provided by show management. Speak to past exhibitors and attendees.
5. Visit the Show
Whenever possible, personally visit the show prior to exhibiting to assess its value. Evaluate the supporting events and/or educational seminars around the show.
6. Consider location
When evaluating a shows potential, take geographical location into consideration. Usually 40-60% of attendees come from a 200-mile radius of the show location. Consider your distribution area and target audience.
7. Consider timing
What other events are scheduled for the same time as the show and will they impact attendance?
8. Evaluate opportunities
What other marketing possibilities could the show offer? Are there opportunities for sponsorship, showcasing new offerings or participation in the educational seminars?
9. Play it safe
Be cautious about participating in a first time show. Promotional material may be extremely persuasive, but a show without prior history is a risky venture.
10. Choose your space wisely
Every trade show is unique and there are many variables affecting direction, volume and quality of traffic past your display. Be familiar with the floor plan and how your trade show booth fits. Consider how close you want to be to the main attractions, industry leaders, competitors, restrooms, food stations, entrances, exits, escalators/elevators/lifts, windows or seminar sites. Avoid obstructing columns, low ceilings, dead-end aisles, loading docks and freight doors, dark/poorly lit spaces, ceiling water pipes, late set-up areas or "black spots" on the floor plan


Ask your tradeshow consultant for advice on all these issues before designing your booth. If they're experienced, they'll be able to plan ahead with you - and you'll save money as a result!

Of Hammers and Nails

Ok, so I'm addicted to "The Closer". Is it Kyra Sedgewick's ducklike cuteness? Or the secret addiction to chocolate? Beats me, but there are some well-drawn characters on this show, and it's fun to get to know them. A recent episode had Brenda's boss telling her "When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail!" in an effort to get her to back off about something or other..... and that line has had me thinking. In what ways am I a hammer, too?

Many customers, when we are searching for ways to promote their widgets, for example, insist on a photo and specifications. It makes sense that as the manufacturer, their focus is on the product and the products specs - and that seems like the really important thing to them. They're being a hammer! We need to remind them that their prospects have a different perspective... a perspective that asks "How will this improve MY life?" and to be relevant to them, we must focus on benefits, not features.

In my daily experience as a small business owner, I'm pulled in every conceivable direction by this business and it's needs. Printer doesn't work? - get Paul. Customer needs an estimate by 2:00? -Paul will need to do that. Whoa! We need to build a crate by 4:00, I'll go get the saw!

The result of all this is sometimes that each new item starts to look like a problem, and that includes things that really are great opportunities. I have to make sure that I don't become a hammer, so that I can recognize a GOOD thing when it pops up. If I've spent the day on technical details regarding my computer network, I have a tendency to treat the next creative challenge as an exercise in lining up features in neat little boxes, instead of finding out what my client really needs!

The bottom line is: Learn to shift viewpoints. When the printer needs its IP address reset, be a nerdy tech head - but don't let that carry over to your phone conversation with a prospective client. If you spend most of your time on one sort of task, remember that some adjustment may be called for when approaching a new and different project.