Nary a cross word was heard.

I think I impressed the daylights out of my co-workers today. It was after 5:00 p.m., and the BigLawFirm's babysitter had gone home for the night, so we all relaxed a bit. Of late, people have been pulling out crossword puzzles to work on, usually a single puzzle, photocopied so a bunch of folks could work on the same puzzle at one time.

About 10 minutes after the other guys had started in, I got a copy of today's puzzle - this week's Sunday puzzle from the Washington Post. A big one, probably 25 x 25 or so. A half-hour later, I was ready to go home, and compared my progress with everyone else. Well, okay, I was comparing the fact that I'd finished mine. And no one else had more than a third of theirs complete. Heh.

What they didn't know is that I grew up working on the Sunday crossword puzzle from the NY Times, and after that, the "difficult" puzzle in Games magazine. And while I haven't worked a hard crossword puzzle in the past 15 years, it seems to be a skill that - like falling off a bicycle - once learned, is not easily forgotten.