I hate Scrabble. So much that I can’t stay away from it.

My friend Jerry is a Scrabble player–I mean a GOOD Scrabble player. He even plays in tournaments.

So when my new computer came with a Scrabble game aboard, I thought, “Hey, give it a whirl. Letters and words, and you work with those every day, don’t you?”

So I loaded the game and started to play. At the end of the thirty-minute trial period, I wanted more, but I wasn’t about to pay the twenty bucks download fee.

So at Target I found a computer Scrabble game for ten bucks. Brought it home, loaded it, and it’s the same game that came on my computer. I started playing, pitting myself again “Maven,” who was ranked as a novice–which means it takes an entire second for him to put down a six-letter word .

At first I lost every time. I felt like a two year old, as all the words I came up with consisted of three letters: OLD. HER. CAR. HAT.

Occasionally I’d get a thrill turning OLD into SOLD or CAR into CARE. Especially if one of the words originated with Maven.

Then I noticed that Maven was using words I’d never use in every day life–I’ve come to think of them as WORDS CREATED FOR PLAYING SCRABBLE. Words like FA. HA. AH. I promise, I heard Maven chuckle when he turned HA into AHA.

So I started to be creative, too: OLAM. (I heard it in a Hebrew prayer.) The referee blew a whistle and threw the tiles back onto my tray. Okay, let’s try ANON. (“Anon, good nurse, I come.” Surely everyone knows that!) Nope–referee challenged me. Okay, IV. Nope, apparently abbreviations that have entered the lexicon are out of bounds.

I just don’t understand why Maven gets away with UH and I’m penalized for DUH.

Last night when I fired up the game, I tried to give Maven a geeky name, just for spite: “Egbert” seemed appropriate. Nope, not allowed. Maven’s ranking is 600; mine has crawled up to 84.

Maven started off the game with MA, playing horizontally. I stuck an N on the end. Then he created AN vertically. Wow, off to a rollicking start.

I tried JIF. Nope, the referee called me out. So later I got reckless and put down LI. Whaddya know, it worked. How about GIF, as in a computer image file? Nope. Alrighty then, how about NA? Aha, it’s legal. RIO? Nope.

Today, when my work is done, I hope to try ROM, RAM, and JPEG, just to see if Scrabble is up to speed. I need to see what Maven uses to play his Qs and Xs and Zs–I always seem to end up with a trayful of those letters. I’m dying for a chance to play QUAD.

Last night Maven played SOMA. I’m convinced he did it only because I played it the night before. (Don’t ask me what it means; I took a wild guess. The referee challenges me a LOT.)

I really hate this game . . . and I can’t wait to play it again.

Angie