I have been spending a lot of time lately developing my relationship with Southwest Airlines. Aside from all the fun and games that comes along with frequent flyer-ship, I’ve also spent enough time reading Spirit magazine to realize that the July issue of the crossword puzzle was missing half of the clues for the “down” column. This made me reminisce on another solution-less puzzle that I came across during my college days.
I have always been a big fan of Dots candy. You know, the gumdrops that come in the yellow box. I don’t know if they still do, but they used to come with little mazes and puzzles on the back side of the box. Well, one day back in 2001, I met a maze that had no solution.
I tried to solve this maze. I tried. And tried. And tried.
Finally, I gave up. There absolutely was no solution to this maze. In my despair, I sent a copy of the un-solvable maze along with a letter to the Dots corporation. (Remember that this is the infancy of the internet, and the address wasn’t on the box. Smartphones weren’t a thing and most likely I had to “Ask Jeeves” or perform a cumbersome search on Yahoo! or the little-known Google. If I even found it online at all – I may have ended up looking at their other candy boxes in the store to find one with a printed address. In other words, I had to do quite a bit of sleuthing).
I didn’t really expect a response.
Turns out, I got one:
