Photo: Twitter
A soulmate for you, if you answer these riddles two.
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on Jan 19, 2023
At 22 years old, you’re likely not expecting to find your one true love on a random night at the bar, but that’s exactly what one man’s cousin did — met his “soulmate” at the bar.
Under the pseudonym “Henpecked Hal,” the man posted screenshots of his conversation with his cousin, who explained that he got “most of” her phone number.
When Hal asked “How do you get most of a number?” his cousin replied with a photo of the napkin she gave him with eight out of the 10 numbers for her phone numbers, and a riddle to guess the last two.
After posting the riddle on Twitter, the entire internet helped Hal’s cousin find his dream girl.
“Call me! 512 - 3*1 - 2*04, Jackie,” read the napkin, leaving Hal’s cousin to figure out the two digits that were left out with asterisks.
At the bottom of the napkin, there was an asterisk with the sentence “Trust me, I’m worth it,” written out.
In shock, Hal’s response was to ask him what he was going to do, to which he replied with a photo of a notebook where he wrote out all of the possible number combinations that he was going through to figure out which one was Jackie’s number.
The tweet was an instant hit, reaching nearly 78 million views, nearly 770,000 likes, and nearly 60,000 retweets — the internet was dedicated to finding Jackie.
“I mean the asterisk is the 8 on a keyboard, any correlation?” one of the top replies suggested.
Some people went even deeper, with one coder writing “I have his back! This is some python code that will generate all possible numbers and send a text via email.”
Many others formed a camaraderie, and claimed that they should all “pitch in and find Jackie.”
“Everyone just needs to fill in whatever random numbers they want, and just call. It will be chaos, but it will be worth it,” they claimed.
One person claimed that since the words “trust me” had seven letters, and “I’m worth it” had nine, the numbers were 7 and 9.
Another person even claimed to have found her after narrowing down possible matches.
“Ok, hold on, it's not as bad as he thinks,” they wrote. “First, there are only two exchanges in 512 that fit, 301 and 321. There is no 311 and there's nothing higher than 325. That's only 20 calls to make.”
After claiming to have found her after 10 minutes, this same user said “If this works out, I'd appreciate the first kid being Laurence or Lauren... just saying.”
A day after the original tweet, Hal checked back in and updated everyone that they found her.
Well, neither Hal nor his cousin actually found Jackie, instead, she was the one who found them.
Hal posted a screenshot of a Twitter DM he received on January 18, 2023, from a woman who claimed to be the one that Hal’s cousin had been searching for.
“Heeeeeyyyyyyyy, so you likely won’t see this, but I’m Jackie from the tweet!” she wrote. “Tell your cousin that the next time I see him I’m going to —” with the rest of the text crossed out in order to not reveal her personal information.
“HOLY S--T!!!!” was Hal’s response. After asking for her number so Hal’s cousin could reach out to him, she replied: “He may not be as clever as he thinks, give me HIS number, I’m taking over this operation.”
The search for Jackie had finally come to a close, and Hal thanked everyone online that helped him and his cousin try to figure out what her real number was.
Despite the fact that no one had actually figured out what her number was, the amount of popularity and traction that the tweet was able to bring brought Jackie to Hal’s DM.
For the people who claimed that Jackie was “high maintenance” or “arrogant,” he explained that she and his cousin had spent an hour talking about their shared interest in true crime, and how he had always been able to solve the case before the show ended, thus leading Jackie to give him a riddle for him to solve.
Of course, Hal never posted the real phone number, as that would be leaking private information, but many people rejoiced at the fact that the riddle had finally been solved.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.