Every now and then I feel like I need to blog about something because it marks a momentous moment in my life. A long-desired goal reached, a milestone met, a banner day. Last night? Why, it was the first time I've been part of a winning team on a bar trivia night! Holla! (The Monkees concert I went to the other night, you ask? That post is coming. Don't you fret.)
It all started, well, right after the hurricane, I guess, when most of my destroyed-by-water office was temporarily relocated to Florida for a few weeks until a new space in NYC could be found. This has been...somewhat of a pain, since, you know, you're pretty much leaving your entire life a thousand behind and not every co-worker is down here, so the workload is significantly crazier. But everyone's tried to make the best of it (the warm weather definitely helps), because there's not much else you can do. Well, yesterday we were making the best of a 25-minute-long respite from work, the result of the fire alarms blaring and flashing throughout the entire giant-ass complex. Nothing was ablaze, but it was seriously loud, so we all congregated outside while the fire department checked things out.
This was close to the end of the day and since we were in good shape, decided to go out to eat as a group. A dozen of us headed down to a nearby shopping area (and passed a guy on a horse along the way - no, really, on the highway and everything). And then it just so happened to be trivia night at the bar we settled on - I was shocked when people said they wanted to stay for it, figuring I was the only nerd who liked that sort of thing in their midst, since I was the only copy editor and all. But then came the rule that teams couldn't have more than five people. So what did we do? Well, two co-workers abstained, and then we split the table in half, like so:
And when battle lines are drawn like that, with rolled-up utensils, you have to take it seriously. Meaning you have to sneer at the co-workers on the other end of the table and talk smack and secretly hope you do win because you are the only copy editor and fact-checker at the table and you should've picked up SOME knowledge from all that reading. The good thing was all five on our team had different areas of expertise, and we worked it as a whole, man. But this is why I love trivia night - you need every person, because you never know what's going to jog someone's memory about something (a class trip to a museum in Former Production Gal Amy's case - it scored us a point few others got). It's like Voltron, but nerdier, man.
My areas of expertise? Well, you know how baseball players say that when they see a good pitch to hit, it usually looks huge to them? Well that was the case on questions such as "What British author was born on the same day he died, April 23rd?" I MEAN IT'S MY BIRTHDAY. Which means I've known basically my whole life that it's William Shakespeare. Also: How many baseball teams does California have? And being able to finish spoken lyrics to what adds up to Aha's "Take on Me". That's my wheelhouse, yo.
The best, though, was when one round consisted of pictures of street signs, and you had to name the city. Most were fairly easy (Rodeo Drive, Michigan Ave., Pennsylvania Ave.) but one had our group somewhat stumped: Beale. One of us knew it was either Nashville or Memphis, and when one of the guys was like, "Which city was Elvis associated with? Memphis, right?" Which sparked Marc Cohn's "Walking in Memphis" in my head, and then I started racing through the lyrics and the one that always kind of stumped me "Walking with my feet ten feet off of Beale" (I used to think it was Beam, which, yeah), which led me to blurting it out (whispered, of course) and then resulted in a round of high-fives that made me re-pull a muscle in my side that I'd hurt in a coughing fit a few weeks ago.
THAT is how trivia night works - teamwork, followed by minor injury.
Our co-workers won the first round, but we took the second round (we won cookies), were a perfect 10-for-10 in the street-sign third round (which we tied with three other teams and we each got a scratch-off lotto card), held our own but lost the fourth round, and then wagered all our points on the final question, which fell under the category of "motorcycles". The guys in our group? Knew the answer right off the bat. And that won us the night... with our co-workers battling back for second place.
Editors, y'all.
