I'm Obsessed

I’m obsessed.

With Scrabble

On my iPod Touch playing Words with Friends

Last week the audio-visual team at work took our Wi-Fi apparatus with them on a trip. It was a long, long week because, see, I have to have Internet access in order to play!

I drove home for lunch every day in order to use our Wi-Fi.

I never return home for lunch. My husband thought I had errands to run.

Thank goodness it takes only six minutes to drive from work to home giving me more time to place tiles and figure out how to score 56 points with a three-letter word.

Words with Friends is a free app for the iPod. You play Scrabble with friends (hence the name, I suppose). Friends or random opponents play and score just as you would if you had a board on a table between you.

You can pay a small fee to purchase the app and be relieved of clicking through ads. (Guess who coughed up the fee?!)

They also have tournaments. In April 2,048 people participated. I got eliminated in the round two. Which is understandable, as it has been years since I’ve played.

I carry a lot of personal Scrabble baggage.

Which segues to a story …

I am the only person in the history of the world to be placed on Scrabble restriction. Yes, you read correctly, Scrabble restriction!

My two-and-a-half-years younger brother could not play the game worth a darn. He took f-o-r-e-v-e-r (13 pts) to figure out a word. The excruciating wait for him to finally make a move drove my best friend and me to hide that we had a game in session.

In my twelfth year (making him either nine or 10), my mother told me I had to let him play with us or not play at all.

One day, my older sister, my best friend and I snuck the game into my sister’s room. In the middle of the game came a tap, tap, tapping at the door.

We scrambled to our feet, heat burning our faces, thunderous hearts in our chests, shaking hands covering the board with a sheet from my sister’s bed.

The knock repeated louder, she used her ring this time and the hollow tap changed to an insistent rap. The normal knock at our house was “shave and a haircut” without the two bits. This drumming on the door had no rhythm.

My friend opened the locked door, side-stepping until she had the security of the door separating her from my mom.

Mom, arms akimbo, glasses sliding down her nose, frosted hair sprayed into a helmet, said, “Hey, your brother and I wanted to play Scrabble but we can’t find the board. Do you happen to know where it could be?”

My brother’s head peeked around her waist, his mouth quirky with glee, a bit of leftover mustard from his mustard and mayonnaise sandwich coating the jut of his chin.

I flipped a page of Forever Amber that I’d hastily retrieved from the floor, looked my mother right in the eye and said I had no idea where the game could be …

Mom brushed past my friend who had inched out of sanctuary, lifted the sheet, turned to me and pointed a finger. “You will put the game back in the box immediately and bring it to the den so your brother and I can play and you will not be allowed to play Scrabble in this house for one month!”

I argued that the educational game would help me learn SAT words, increase my vocabulary, ensure I received a college scholarship, she couldn’t possible restrict me from playing it. Could she? Oh, yes, she could!

I spent a lot of time at my friend’s house that month. She owned the fancy game with the indents for the tiles so the loss of playing at my house did not hurt as much as my mother wished.

And my friend’s little brother didn’t like the game.

I’m still a bit bitter about the entire incident.

Gotta go, I have eight concurrent Scrabble games to catch up on!

Find out more at the app store or www.wordswithfriends.net