What do you do when you complete your jigsaw puzzle and find you're missing a piece?!?
It happened to me twice.
The first time was probably 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I and 2 other friends took part in a jigsaw puzzle competition in the uni, and we came in 2nd. The prize was a 750 piece puzzle from Heye, sponsored by one of the local jigsaw puzzle shops. I made that prize puzzle with my girlfriend and when we completed it, we discovered to our 'horror' that there was 1 piece missing. How disappointing! It just didn't feel right, after all the effort we put in, to come up short. Although we knew that the puzzle was a prize, we still felt somewhat short-changed.
We decided to go to the shop to see if we could get some help from them. We brought with us the pieces surrounding the missing piece. I remember that the shop was at Serene Centre. It's no longer around, although Serene Centre still is. At the shop, we were fortunate to meet the same lady who gave away the prizes to us after the competition. She recognised us. When we told her about our 'problem', she told us to look for the same puzzle on the shelf. We found it; the puzzle was new and still sealed. The lady told us that we could open up the puzzle to look for the missing piece. How nice of her! We tore open the wrapping, poured the pieces onto the floor, and started looking. Again fortunately, our missing piece was one of the unusual ones, one of those with 3 innies. The majority of the other pieces were of the 2 innies 2 outies variety. The few customers who came into the shop and who saw us sitting on the floor doing............ ["What the hell are those 2 doing?"]. After about 20 minutes, we found it.............the missing link! The shade of the missing piece was slightly lighter than our set <picky picky> but..........I digress. We put back the pieces into the box, thanked the lady, and happily left the shop. After we left the shop, we did wonder if the lady would sell the incomplete set, or whether she had a way to exchange it with her supplier, but we knew we were lucky to find our missing piece.
My second experience (well.........kind of) was just recently, about 6 weeks ago. My youngest was doing a 204 miniature piece puzzle and when she completed it, she found 1 piece missing. Unlike 20 years ago, the jigsaw puzzle shop here in Singapore now has a formal way for customers to request for missing pieces. There's a standard form the shop gives to customers with each purchase, detailing what needs to be done in order to make such a request. My youngest pestered me to quickly submit the form; I think she was feeling the same way as I did some 20 years ago. However, because I wasn't the one actually completing the jigsaw (and except for 1 or 2 pieces didn't even contribute at all), I don't think I felt emotionally involved in the puzzle. That and work and other stuff, well, I put off completing the form and submitting it. Hey, it still would have taken 8-10 weeks for the request to be processed even if I had done it immediately! Then one day, while opening the drawer to look for something, my youngest found the missing piece! She guesses that the piece must have dropped into the drawer during either the opening or sorting part. Problem solved, despite my lack of effort. This is the pic of the completed puzzle:
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| 204 piece miniature puzzle |
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