Puzzle #1: Where It All Began (2020)

It started with a silly YouTube video, released on June 2nd, 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown.

We're shown a simple video of Truck holding up single pieces of paper with clues written on them. While this is happening, we hear beeps in the background. The pieces of paper tell us:

• It's a one-word answer.
• What you hear and what you don’t are equally important.
• We are all guilty of it.

One word quite literally jumped out at some of you, though: focus. Did you notice the quick glitch in the video right around the 12-second mark? There, on the right-hand side, was the word “focus”. If you blinked, you may have missed it. However, that would just be too easy to say that was the right answer—I mean, why make the reference to the importance of what we hear and what we don’t hear if that were the solution? And who has ever been guilty of “focus”? No, this isn’t the answer… maybe just something to throw you off the trail a little bit. Or perhaps some encouragement?

On June 15th, on Facebook, a hint was dropped: There are 26 seconds in this video.

In our case here, 26 refers to the 26 letters of the alphabet. Let’s go back to the video. If you notice, the beeps all fall right on time with the seconds of the video’s timeline. If we label each second of the video as a corresponding letter of the alphabet, where 1 equals A and 26 equals Z, we notice that the beeps give us the following letters: E, G, H, I, K, N, O, R, T, and V.

What can we make of these letters? It seems to be some kind of word scramble, doesn’t it? Plugging these letters into an anagram solver doesn’t yield any obvious answer, let alone any one-word answers. What could this be? What are we missing? Well, digging deeper into this, you may have noticed that a couple of the beeps sounded different than the others. Two of them specifically, at the 9-second and 14-second marks. Listen. Did you hear that?

Going by what we’ve already learned, the timing of these beeps correspond to the letters I and N. What is different about these letters? Perhaps they are used more than once for the purposes of our puzzle? What if those particular letters are used twice? That would give us E, G, H, I, I, K, N, N, O, R, T, and V.

If we follow this through to the conclusion, the solution is: OVERTHINKING .

It’s one word, and it’s certainly something we are all guilty of! And no doubt some of you employed some of this in trying to solve this puzzle. And, yes… perhaps I too was overthinking when I decided to create this mental exercise. So that is it, friends! Puzzle #1 is in the books. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed putting it together and seeing you try to solve it.