With the advent of the Internet and DSL, and all the high speed, realtime, streaming media entertainments it has to offer, I never dreamt I'd get hooked on a simple pencil-in number puzzle. Then I happened across a photocopy of a blank Sudoku puzzle a coworker left by my desk.

I'd heard of the game in passing but had no idea what it was. I gawked at the page, aptly puzzled. A grid made up of nine boxes with nine smaller squares inside stared back at me, some with numbers already filled in. I turned it this way and that. What the heck did you do with it?

"Oh yeah, Sudoku," another coworker proudly informed me.

"How do you do it?"

"You just fill in the boxes so every square has the numbers one through nine. Oh, and every horizontal and vertical line has to have the numbers one through nine, too."

That was IT? That was the big phenomenon? A five year old could manage that! So I thought.

I was off and running. I ended up erasing that "simple" puzzle enough times to nearly tear through the paper--BUT in the process I found penciling numbers into those squares curiously satisfying and fascinating. By the time I had finished, I was hooked.

Immediately my eyes opened to Sudoku all around me. Three employees in other departments worked puzzles that same night (um, all of them on their breaks, of course...ahem). The next day, WalMart's shelves sprouted several Sudoku books, which I nabbed greedily. Within a few weeks the local paper was running a Sudoku puzzle in their daily edition. Everywhere I went with my puzzle books, people stopped dead in their tracks to ask where I'd gotten them and to stare longingly. One guy appeared to be sizing me up for a bait-and-switch to make off with my puzzles. On our annual trip to visit the folks, I got my father-in-law hooked by the time we left.

What IS so entrancing about penciling numbers into a grid? It's tough to explain the draw-- "it's a number puzzle" only sounds SO interesting, after all. Yet this craze has swept much of the world, from Japan (who dusted it off from older origins) to the UK and now the States. It's deceptively simple, requiring no math, rocket science, or creativity. (Guesswork is suicide for this puzzle.) Pure, logic based fun.

Oddly, I don't find online or handheld varieties of the game nearly as satisfying as the old-fashioned pencil and paper type. Personal preference, I'm sure, one that has allowed me to amass enough eraser dust to reconstruct an entire eraser factory. And yet, among the teeming masses I Sudoku. Do you?