Connecting By Connecting

By Chris Delaney

This is the tale of one very stubborn little jigsaw puzzle and the group effort it took to get it all done.  (Don't worry, it's relevant.)

My supervisor at the Civil Division of the Department of Justice, Gail Johnson and I, decided at the beginning of my internship in September to continue the tradition of the Puzzle Challenge.  By tradition, I mean that it's been going on since about... July.  But the interns that brought it into fruition left quite the puzzle-solving legacy behind, and I was hooked.

Well, this is where we started.

This was a week later.

At this point, it was still just Gail and I, and she wondered whether we'd finish the puzzle at all before I left at the beginning of December.  This unassuming puzzle of a batch of cupcakes had been nothing but pure evil.  Or, at the very least, for the Justice Department there was very little justice being served here.  Strong language for a jigsaw puzzle, but these were trying times at the Civil Division.

Turns out, the key wasn't some secret wushu jigsaw puzzle strategy that let us finish it in 5 minutes. Although I guess it could have been.  But for us newcomers there was a much simpler way to put it all together: bring in more of us!  All I had to do was look around, strike up a conversation with some of the great people working around me here and there, and boom.  The puzzling coalition was taking shape.  Soon enough, there were four of us working on it - as far as we know.  More than once I arrived at my office (dubbed "The Nest" by Gail, it's been home to her interns at the Civil Division since 2000) in the morning, only to find here and there a few more pieces put together than I remembered when I had left the previous day.  I hadn't realized it when we started the puzzle, but this was one very clever, stress-free way to make connections with some of the great people around me.  It's no surprise, then, that as of this past Wednesday it looks like this:

All done!  Look at all those beautiful cupcakes!  They look delicious, you have to admit.  The only downside is we couldn't eat them.  I was far from the only person in the office to comment on this unfortunate circumstance.

All taken care of.

The next day, to celebrate, Gail came into the office with a large bag of... something.  Puzzled (ugh), I figured I'd let her explain.  And so a couple minutes later, I found out.  No, nothing suspicious. Cupcakes!  Everyone was free to come for coffee and as many cupcakes as they wanted.  Based on the success of this midday Thursday celebration, I think we may have a few more contributors to our jigsaw puzzle network going forward.  

Makes me think, maybe everyone should network this way!