Lateral Thinking

I don’t remember where it came from – I always remember having it, at least since my teens. It probably came from Toys R’ Us, because that’s the only other place I ever saw the rectangular black-and-purple tin box with the word “MindTrap” emblazoned boldly across the top, blue streaks of lightning in the background. Within, some 500 lateral thinking puzzles made class time a little less boring.

I used to take the entire box to school, whittling dead time away in class stretching the membranes of fellow students finished with their busywork for the day. I had every solution but the mathematical ones memorized – the math problems, I felt, were a form of busywork unto themselves, reliant on actual logic and numbers rather than creative solutions. The misadventures of Detective Shadow, Sam Sham, Sam Shady, and the magician Dee Sceptor laid the foundation for an obsession that continues to this day, and create a problem for my present day self – I am all out of lateral thinking puzzles.

Quite literally, there has not been a single lateral thinking problem posed to me that I haven’t heard before. I may not recall the answer right away, but a familiar set-up is a dead giveaway. I still have my tin box, buried somewhere in the back of my family’s spare room turned storage room, but it’s hardly worth the effort to retrieve it. It’s no fun knowing all the answers.

Unless you’re holding that knowledge over the heads of other people playing, but that’s an entirely different scenario.