Andras’ personal page

I rode to town with a super-cool taxi driver uncle yesterday. A Rubik-cube Zen Master!

As soon as I got in the car, I saw he had some kind of puzzle on the middle console. I asked him what it was and he told me it was an advanced Rubik-cube which he has been trying to put together. He said his best time on it so far was 2 hours and he is still trying to find new ways to assemble it and improve his time. 

“You know what?”, he asked. “I have several more. Wanna see them?” I said “Sure!”. So he immediately proceeded to pull over to the side of the street and pulled out 2 more highly complex models from the glove compartment and one basic one. “These”, he said “I can assemble in 30 minutes. The original one in less than a minute”. 

I was in awe! I can’t even assemble the basic one (shame on me as a Hungarian, given the inventor is Hungarian as well), not to mention any of the other, space age-looking versions. 

As we started geeking out about these pieces, I saw his eyes lit up and a boy-ish feeling of fun and mischief descended into our maroon Prius Strides cab. I could sense he was really enjoying working on these and even more to talk about his challenges. He even pulled out a set of notes he took on how to solve different versions. 

He was so much into the game that he pulled it out every time we had to stop at a red light. Our boy-ish mischief morphed into chuckles when pretty much at every light we got honked on as he was lost in his game too much to notice the light turned green already. 

Awesome experience and learning about different versions out this challenging puzzle out there. It was great to experience how much joy and fun the uncle had devoting his time to these games. 

I was also reminded how little patience I have for such skull-cracking challenges. But that’s besides the point. I am still smiling; writing this reflection more than a day after the whole thing happened….