Today I wanted to send a message of love to a certain someone, so I decided it was a good day for an arts and crafts project. I started with a general idea of what I wanted to do, and I just made up the rest as I went along.
First I searched for “jigsaw template” on Google images, until I found a jigsaw puzzle template I particularly liked – a square image of twelve puzzle pieces drawn as black outlines against white. I saved the file to my computer.
Then on my tablet PC I scrawled my little message with the MS-Paint spray brush, making sure that lots of the letters crossed over from one puzzle piece to the next to make it more challenging. A puzzle is a bit like love – it’s best when it isn’t too easy.
When I liked the result I sent it to the laser printer.
Then I got a roll of double-stick tape, and laid it down in strips against a piece of black cardboard, until the taped area was as big as my printed puzzle.
I pressed the paper down onto the exposed sticky tape, making sure it was firmly affixed everywhere.
Now came the hard part.
I put on those super powerful 3.25 diopter reading glasses that I wrote about the other day in my post about “The Big Picture”, and worked my way through the puzzle with an X-acto knife, carefully cutting along all the puzzle lines. It’s amazing how precisely you can cut along an edge when the tip of your nose is just four inches above the table top.
Even so, it took the better part of an hour to cut out all twelve puzzle pieces. During this time I had two meetings at work. The other people at the meetings, once they realized what I was doing, kept getting silly grins on their faces. I guess it must seem very romantic to devote so much time and effort just to send a message to a special someone in such a nutty way.
One colleague told me “Don’t let my wife find out you’re doing that.” I guess he figured she’d start expecting the same from him.
Finally, when I was done, I stuffed the twelve puzzle pieces into a little envelope (with an extra piece of cardboard trimmed to size and inserted into the envelope for backing), and mailed it off.
Now of course comes the really fun part – waiting for the response…
Ken, Ken, I hope you and your PR team decided for a mass mailing, so that you avoid thousands of disappointed fans, finding nothing in their mailboxes. 🙂
If not, I suggest to fire your PR team immediately!!!
Gosh, I had no idea I wield such power. I believe it was the great Roman senator and historian Tacitus who said “With great power comes great responsibility.”
No wait – that was Spiderman’s uncle… 😉