A Funny Story About the Cube

- by Otto

It was a dark and stormy lunchtime and I was teaching my friend Xavier how to solve the 4×4. Xavier was very tall with dark hair and a love for the 3×3, his solve time was 19 seconds and mine being 27 seconds he never let me forget it. I had just taught him the algorithm to pair up two edges (the last step before solving it like a 3×3) and he wanted to try to solve it (he only needed to learn the OLL parity).

So I got out my speed timer and he started timing: white centre, yellow centre and so on. But when he got to the last 3×3 algorithm CRASH!!! The cube hit the ground with a thud. Once he had finally picked it up he did the wrong algorithm meaning he had to solve it again: White centre, yellow centre and so on.

As the timer read 7:11.61 secs Xavier had just finished F2L and had got OLL parity (the one he didn’t know) and the only way for him to solve that was to muck it up and redo, so: white centre, yellow centre and so on. So after that mayhem his time was 12:09.27.

He wanted to time again because he got “unlucky”. After I had mucked it up he started to solve it: White centre, yellow centre and so on. After a lot of people had gathered round Xavier and I what looked like was in slow motion he slapped down his hands as the timer changed from 2:12.99 to 2.13.00 secs just as the bell went to signal the end of lunch. In class Xavier was constantly bugging me to use my 4×4 and so I didn’t want to but I let him use it. Then he went over to his bag, pulled out a 5×5 and solved it in 1:39.12 secs.