Starbucks Crossword Contest

[rhu]

OK, so now that nothing I say can matter....

After six weeks of clever puzzles with layers upon layers, I was expecting a challenging final crossword puzzle with clues like "Take 7 down from puzzle 2 and anagram it to find the clue for 14 across in this puzzle". But, no, it turned in to how fast can you type in the partial answers, how fast can you notice something about the partial answers that was obvious a week ago, and then are you going to be lucky enough to get through on the phone lines in the first five minutes?

What really ticks me off is that even if I hadn't solved the last few pieces, I was planning to call in at 2pm with what turns out to have been the right answer because it seemed like as good a guess as any. So in a sense you really didn't need to finish solving to qualify.

So as far as I know, I'm in the tie-breaker round. They'll call back tomorrow if so. And I really hope the tie-breaker is a test of skill.

If I were only interested in winning I would be happy that the easy nature of this step and the 750-person cutoff means that some portion of the competition will be less up to the challenge, so that would be a good thing. But I know I'm not likely to win; I want to know how many minutes I end up behind the winner. This is the closest I'm ever likely to get to competing at Stamford.


So I'm a little ticked right now, but I still say the preceding puzzles were brilliant and my hat remains off to Patrick Berry and Will Shortz.

Comments

Hmmm...

[jeffurrynpl.livejournal.com]

If I'm interpreting what you said correctly, I may have inadvertently given the correct answer even though I wasn't sure. Then again, it depends how they interpret MY answer. I think I may have given A and B as A and then I gave the magic word as B... Oy. I guess I'll find out. I got through at 2:05.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

It doesn't seem fair that after all that it came down to how fast you could dial a phone...