I was watching Wheel of Fortune a couple weeks ago and it was time for the final puzzle. I’m pretty sure the unlucky contestants have less than a minute to try and figure out what it is, after they’ve guessed all their letters and had them filled in. Maybe it’s even thirty seconds or less.
Whatever the case, it’s basically no time whatsoever to figure out what the phrase is unless you are some sort of genius, which most of us are not. So most of us are not going to go home with the all-expenses-paid trip to Disneyworld for four, or the brand new Escalade. We will take our shiny new set of pots and pans and remember that we were “this close” every single stinking time we use them… Or the basketball hoop that gets set up in the driveway that no one ever uses because there is nobody in the house between the ages of nine and twenty-two. Perhaps this is coming across a little too personal, and you might think that none of this has anything to do with packaging and shipping supplies. Just wait.
On this particular night the final puzzle was two long lines, and dotted with ‘s’, ‘I’ and ‘e’. The part that kept throwing me off was how the second word ended in in ‘lies’, which signifies a plural but that you still wind up seeing only very rarely. I couldn’t get it. The most ridiculous things kept popping up in my head: prator willies, travelling something, apologizing profusely… It was starting to get really annoying, the nonsense that just kept popping up in my brain.
You will never guess what the final phrase wound up being. It was “packaging supplies”. Said what? I was dumbfounded. Just dumbfounded, and also really deeply ashamed. I am in the business of packaging and shipping supplies (well, not really, but I write about them almost every day), and the fact that it didn’t even cross my mind was really kind of shocking and appalling. I mean, how could I have not looked at that and started jumping up and down because I knew what it was?
I could have gone on that show and blown everyone away and they would have all been like, “What? How would she have ever known to guess that?” and then I might find myself being stalked and then kidnapped and interrogated about how I cheated, but I would tell stories about my life and how it was freakishly ironic that I know packaging and shipping supplies. If it had been anyone else… But that time, that time it was me, and I won the trip to Disneyworld. I’m so freaking excited…
