Congratulations on Cracking the Code!

You’ll have spent an hour and a half reading the back of that cereal box that morning. Normally you just glance at it idly and kept on eating whatever the fuck is in that frosted shit you cram down your cram hole with reckless abandon. But today, while reading over a fascinating article on the back about how the maze at the bottom contains hidden treasure deviously concealed somewhere within, you’ll catch a tidbit at the end about how you should really solve the word search. It’ll address you by name.

Puzzled, you’ll read the area beneath it. It’ll inform you:

Solve the word search and you’ll uncover a fun secret, Craig!

You’ll read on:

Fucking do it, pussy!

Incensed, you’ll call in sick to work, pick up a pad of note paper and start scribbling away. You’ll discern, after finding a set of key words in the search, that the entire thing is actually an adjustment cipher keyed to a pattern illustrated in a deck of cards. You’ll grab a brand new deck from the Walgreens near your house and get to work testiing and teasing out solutions.

You’ll spend nearly two hours deriving the cipher from various hints and links left in the messages you’ve circled, two hours putting all that time you spent in the CIA as a “copy clerk” to good use. By the time you figure out just what the code is it’ll be long past lunch, but you won’t care.

You’ll feel no hunger, spare a burning one for solving puzzles, one you’ll pursue rapaciously. It won’t be long before you sit with a brief message written on your paper, so engaged in the decoding of the individual letters that you won’t know just what the message is until it sits completed before you. It will be short and to the point.

I’m fucking your ex-wife, asshole!

You’ll let out a sigh. You should’ve remembered that your bitch of an ex-wife had started sleeping with a guy who edited the backs of cereal boxes just before she left you, but in your rush to solve a personalized puzzle you forgot. Chewing your lip you’ll look at the clock realizing that you wasted half your day. You’ll have wasted half your day thinking about her again, and that’ll make you sad.

Congratulations on Cracking the Code!