23 Men Down

Counting the Wedding Feast (Twice...). Notice I placed 100 in 10 sections.

You may remember that I received the Wedding Feast at Cana (9,120pc from Ravensburger) a while back and it was all jacked up! The seller of this ebay auction simply dumped the 9000 pieces in the box and wrapped it in paper, and thought it should make it 5000 miles to me just fine.

Well it didn't (understatement), and although the seller disagreed with me, ebay buyer protection did, and refunded all of my money. It's only fair, it wasn't my fault the seller was an idiot and her actions most assuredly left puzzle pieces from here to Germany.

Last time I had to count pieces, I made stacks of 10. This was
I think I pretty good method now that I have been through
the other way.

So anyhow, last night I decided to take stock of the state of affairs and start counting this puzzle. Previously when I counted a puzzle, I would make stacks of 10 pieces enabling me to visually check that each stack was the correct height. This seemed like a very slow way to do things, so I tried just counting sets of 10, making a collection of 100, then 500 at a time put them in a plastic bag (so that I would have 9 bags plus a small 120 piece bag at the end)

This seemed to go really fast, and in fact I counted all 9000 pieces in 3.5 hours. When I got done the first time, I was missing something like 37 pieces. So I started thinking, that was weird, and I remembered several times I would accidentally make a 6th column when I was counting my 100 pieces. If I did this and matched it up, that would be 20 pieces short and if I did that twice, that would be 40 and maybe somewhere along the line, I made a 3 piece mistake..... so I started counting the now 9 bags of 1000 over.

I decided to recount and make neat little rows of 10 pieces so I could count easily inspect that I had exactly 10 pieces. This was way faster than stacks!

My own, my Precious.

The first bag was a piece short, so now I was up to 38 missing pieces, the second bag had 3 extra pieces lowering the count to 35 missing pieces! The fifth bag had 19 extra dropping the count to 16 but finally the ninth bag was missing 3 pieces for a total of 19 missing pieces.

Lesson learned: If you are going to count a 9,120 piece puzzle, do it very methodically so you don't have to do it again...

So.......


It's a sad state of affairs for this puzzle. It has 19 missing pieces and 4 broken ones (as you can see form the previous post.) What would you do? My first reaction was to say F this puzzle, but I slept on it and thought, what would you do if this was the last copy of Wedding Feast at Cana on the planet? I mean, its WAY out of print, it is possible that I might not be able to get another copy of it, or if I do, it too could be lost or damaged in shipping....

M came home and I explained the situation and I told her I wasn't going to do it. I do happen to know where I can get a sealed copy and who would do a puzzle missing 23 pieces.... but then I thought, what would I do with this puzzle? Just throw it away? Toss it out because its previous owner was abusive?

No! 

This will not do! 

I will build you!

If your piece is missing, I will make you a new one! If your piece is broken, I will mend it! I will not leave you to be buried like some piece of rotting garbage! You will live!

YOU WILL LIVE MY PRECIOUS!!!!!!

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