It’s a Puzzle

Once again, my view of reality is shattered, and one more pillar holding up the ceiling of how I thought the world worked has crumbled.
Over the past couple of days we put together a 2,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. Well, mostly Helena and Isabel. I put a couple pieces in here and there, and Sam stayed the hell away, as he tends to do with anything not football related. It was a puzzle of several of the world’s landmarks, the Eiffel Tower, Sydney Opera House, the Roman Coliseum, stuff like that. I was amazed that we finished in two days. With one piece missing. It was an edge piece, mostly light green lawn and at the top a strip of white, which was the base of the Mayan Pyramid.
So, anyway, just now, Helena, seeing I wasn’t doing anything productive with my day, suggested a solution. Since she just happened to have on hand the same exact puzzle in a different box, which is not as surprising as you think. I don’t think the puzzles quite outnumber the books on our shelves, but in raw area, they’re pretty close to even. She suggested I sort through and find the missing piece, and I said “Oh, hell no” or words to that effect, because I am not even good at jigsaw puzzles, much less finding 1 piece in 2,000, but the more I thought about it, this was an entirely different skill set. I didn’t have to find one piece. I just had to eliminate all the others, first by sorting out everything that wasn’t an edge, and then tossing aside everything that wasn’t light green.
I found it in about 5 minutes. But, it didn’t fit. It had to fit, that was it’s spot, but it didn’t fit. I called Helena over, expecting her to tell me I was stupid and that went somewhere else, but she agreed. She then found a couple of other pieces which could only go in a very specific spot, and they didn’t fit, either. Same picture, cut in different ways. “Why would they do that?” she asked. “To stop people like us,” I said.
But, really? Why would they do that?