Postcard from Bishkek

My mother used to love Jigsaw puzzles.

A jigsaw is a tiling puzzle – involving numerous small, often oddly shaped, interlocking and tessellating pieces that have ti be assembled. Each piece usually has a small part of a picture on it and when complete, a jigsaw puzzle produces a complete picture.

Jigsaw puzzles were originally created by painting a picture on a flat, rectangular piece of wood or card, and then cutting that picture into small pieces with a jigsaw, (hence the name).

Typical images found on jigsaw puzzles include scenes from nature, buildings, and repetitive designs.

She would take the box holding the individual pieces and tip them our onto a table.  She would turn them over so that the elements of the picture were uppermost.  Starting with the straight edges and prominent pieces of the design, she would try to recreate the picture.  Sometimes, especially when the puzzle was second hand, the odd piece had been lost time would be lost searching for the missing element.

At least she usually had the original picture to act as a guide and knew that, (unless some of the pieces had been mislaid or mixed up with those from another puzzle), there was a solution.  Some modern jigsaws are plain and don’t have a picture … I don’t think she would have liked those even though she would have enjoyed the challenge.  Some don’t have straight edges so they don’t have the obvious starting point but, although that might have slowed down her progress, I don’t think it would have unduly worried her.

Many years ago, in what seems to have been a different life, I was involved in helping to construct the school timetable.

I got involved because I had already been timetabling the Parent-Teacher consultation meetings and that seemed to convince the powers that be that computers were seen as a tool that might be able to simplify the process.  We soon learned, however, that although the use of computers helped a great deal, in most cases they only take the drudgery out of some of the more routine aspects of the task.

Like most of my colleagues, I looked at the board used by the Director of Studies as he tackled the task; with its little pieces of coloured card with strange codes written on them, and automatically compared it to a jigsaw.  We couldn’t have been more wrong.

Constructing a timetable is NOT an easy task – and, although there are some similarities in that it involves trying to put together a variety of different disparate pieces to make a complete “picture”, it’s not really like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle.  There is no guarantee that was a solution.  One of the advantages of using a computer was that it made it possible to identify and rule out some of the impossible variants as early as possible so that we didn’t have to pull all the pieces out of the board in order to start over again.

The timetabler has to bring together a variety of factors and meld them together like a jigsaw puzzle: the class, subjects, teachers, rooms, time and day.  The constraints are far more unforgiving than those those governing a jigsaw puzzle.  A teacher cannot, for example, teach two classes at the same time; or a science laboratory cannot accommodate two groups at once; a group cannot be be timetabled for French three times in one day even if those are the only time slots available because of commitments already made at an earlier stage of the process … and so on.

Designing a tour is a little like constructing a school timetable.  We also have to bring together several elements, timings and places, activities, transport, accommodation, personnel, (drivers, guides and animators – for entertainment) … which have to fit into a given price range.

 

We offer a number of suggested tour itineraries, but a lot of our work involves making individual, customized itineraries – unique for a particular group in order to meet their individual specific requirements.  The basic principle is:

The client decides what they want to do – tell us – and we see if it is possible

Sometimes we get quite detailed requests whereas other are much more nebulous … we look at each one to see if it is possible to fulfill the request, deciding where to stay, where to eat, what activities are possible in each location.

As with constructing a school timetable, however, sometimes it is not possible to do everything … there may not be enough time available, the distances involved may to great, there may be nowhere to stay or eat … or it may prove to be too expensive.

 

 

 

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