Omega-Gate
The life of a crossword compiler is a mild kind of existence. You clock into the office most weekday mornings….
(By office I mean the made-over chook shed out the backyard with PC, dictionaries and reams of graph paper.)
…you sharpen your pencils, and you begin to weave. Or compose. Or thatch. Or whatever the craft analogy may be.
Come day’s end, you leave your interlocking for the next visit. A continuum of huumdruum to the non-verbal onlooker. But a type of bliss for one with my affliction. Mix that with freelance gigs, book projects, radio reviews and a spot of journalism teaching, and one week merrily resembles the next.
Unless the unthinkable happens, when a crossword you create fails to appear as it should in the daily press. Like last week’s Omega puzzle in the Sydney Morning Herald.
I won’t delve into specifics, as the balls-up remains sub judice, but can you imagine spending the best part of a week finessing a 21×21 crossword, lining the puzzle with the full ANZAC ode – all 135 letters – only to see the system spit out an inferior glitch-laced draft?
The moment must rank among my professional nadirs, which is fantastic to use such a crossword-word in the plural form, but tragic that the publication gaffe was out of my hands.
Not that the Herald solvers knew that at the time, facing a fallible set of clues, with a few misdirections and half a dozen anachronisms. Naturally they blamed me. As scapegoats go, DA must stand for Direct Attack. I still have the ego-bruises to show. But truth be known, the same DA had prepared a kinder, truer, more-up-to-date challenge that was ready to roll onto the page until the mysterious 11th hour - when gremlins intervened.
Thankfully the echelons at Fairfax have recognised this serious goof – a rough draft of the puzzle appearing via an ignorant interloper – and graciously placed an apology on yesterday’s puzzle page.
Meantime, a crack forensic team has been assigned the investigation, their task to single out a more deserving scapegoat, and hopefully improve the kind of system that can undo a composer’s labour at the stab of a wrong button. And while stones are turned, and QWERTY history analysed, yours truly will drain a mug of chamomile to soothe the liver, and get back to some mischievous weaving.
(So long as what I make is the very same creation that makes you – the solver – enmeshed. And not un-delighted. A brave prayer, I know, but it’s the only way I can face the daily chook shed.)