Fat Fingers

My wife and I have the same crossword puzzle app on our phones. Each day they send a new puzzle and it’s the same for everyone who has the app. At dinner, we both load the puzzle on our phones and have a race to see who can finish it first. In the two years that we’ve been competing, I can count on one hand, (which is missing a few fingers), the number of times I have beaten her.

At first, I became frustrated; why does she beat me every time! Then after considerable thought, I came up with a few revealing observations:

First, the puzzle assumes real words and correct spelling. Sometimes when I realize that I’m behind, I fill the squares with any letter.

Second, we always play after I’ve just come home from a sixteen-hour day at work. I once dozed off and laid my head on the phone, rapid dialing “%” in every box with the tip of my nose.

Third, my feminist phone decides the order of the clues. I will get the clue: Ukrainian lawn mower. Cheryl gets: Mary had a ____ lamb. I get: Quebec town. She gets: Disney mouse, (star). The game is stacked against me!

Last, her fingers are half the thickness of mine. I have fat fingers! I can hear her typing on her cell with both thumbs, “Clickety, click, click.” My single finger goes, “Thumpity, thump, thump.” I type rapidly on the small keyboard only to find that my finger hits every key except the ones I wanted. Thumpity, thump, thump, backspace, backspace, look at Marty go. (All of a sudden, I’m singing Frosty the Snowman.)

And then comes the coup de grace. The moment Cheryl waits for every night because she knows it drives me crazy. I am feverishly deleting misspelled words, my eyes darting to her phone sensing she will enjoy what happens next, and one of the following events happen: 1) She makes one of those “I’m bored” sounds and stands up to leave. 2) She flips her phone over on the table, folds her hands behind her head and stares at me. Or, 3) She whispers, “I’m done.” She then watches for my reaction and bursts into laughter. Lately my reaction has been a lot meaner.

So, you may say, “You know you will lose to your wife every night. You know it makes you mad every time. Why do you still challenge her?”

I can answer that easily. “I have purchased $8.00 worth of Lotto tickets each week for the last 15 years. All that money lost will become a moot point because one of these days, I’m going to win.”

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