Last night, a PR person contacted me and said to expect a mysterious "puzzle piece" to arrive the next morning. I steepled my fingers, squeezed in my monocle, and warned her that it was unlikely that we'd participate in a marketing thing like that.

It arrived anyway. It turned out, however, to be a gigantic 3D-printed robot head. My heart softened just a little at this, not least because of the irony embodied by how thoroughly FedEx had managed to destroy it, despite the enormous padded box it came in. It's amazing how good FedEx is at destroying packages. Protip: don't send organs via FedEx, even if it's just a hobby.

It turns out that the puzzle is part of a code, and a bunch of tech blogs all have to punch theirs in at the website for a new Droid cellular handset. This will unlock something. "Something" presumably being "an ad", right? So I found the code and punched it in, just to be a good sport. But it didn't work. Their flash site just said "Verifying Code" and never did. At this, I said oh well!, then got on with my day.

So now, of course, all the other sites have done their bit and Boing Boing is being harangued on Twitter by Droid fans to get with the program. Sneaky, intelligent PR here. But this makes it interesting! What should I do? Let's vote:

1) Just punch it in! Also, your pious avoidance of naming the advertiser is vaguely irritating, because you've posted it anyway and we're just going to go and look it up now. I have eight credit cards.

2) Post a picture of the code with a rival manufacturer's logo concealing a couple of digits, leaving a few hundred possible combinations to try.



2B) and dont post it until 1 minute remains on the 'deadline' countdown at the puzzle website.

3) Screw 'em.

THE CHOICE IS YOURS!

UPDATE: 11:45 a.m. – I am informed by PR that they have triggered our code entry without any further action from us.

♫ I HAD A FEELING/

I HAD A FEELING ONCE/

UNTIL SOMEONE TOOK IT AWAY/

UNTIL SOMEONE TOOK IT AWAY (OH YEAH) ♭