‘REJOB’ by Botox
Posted by Encota on 9 Mar 2018
What a class act!!
The numerical part of this puzzle was tough enough in its own right: I had a spare grid of A-Z by 1-26 where only very slowly did I manage to exclude enough possibilities. For me it needed a mix of pencil, paper, calculator, Excel and a small amount of code (for time saving purposes only, rather than brute-forcing) to solve – i.e. it required the full armoury – quite rare for a Numerical in its own right. This stage probably took about 90% of the time.
I was fortunate that, after my initial (wrong) guess of letters on an old telephone dial that, in initially incorrectly guessing whether A or J etc were going to represent 0, that the title still re-coded to HOTEL, which gave me a good clue as what to look for. Using the phonetic alphabet, including Hotel, was of course a beautiful addition, as was the lack of a Room 13 (aside: our road doesn’t have a house no.13, for the same reason, presumably). And did Botox use two and only two occurrences of each letter’s phonetic equivalent? I didn’t double check but if feels like they may have done: if so then do have Double Bonus Points 😉
Setting A=1 rather than 0 gave me all I required for working out the five Letter-based entries and so all was (finally) sorted. Took me until late morning Sunday, so definitely in the Fiendish category.
And I spent a few days last week looking for a suitable photo for Grid B. Herewith the side elevation of the closest I could find:
Very enjoyable – thanks again! I look forward to catching up with several of you in a few weeks in Paris.
Tim / Encota
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