12.1.03 | Trivial Matters

Now that I've been living in London for almost a year, I have collected a few "do not" recommendations for visiting Americans. First: Don't bother going on the Buckingham Palace tour. Second: Don't wear white socks. Third: Don't go into a dry cleaner's shop and say, "I've soiled my pants." Four: Unless you're a trivia god, don't engage in any British trivia games.

Last week, Claudine and I went to a pub quiz. (A pub quiz is a popular form of entertainment that elevates regular bar trivia into an organized event. Imagine playing "Trivial Pursuits" at home whilst sucking down pints of Carling or Guinness and you'll have the general idea.) This particular quiz was hosted by an employment agency that specializes getting accountants hired. It had invited its clients -- Claudine's employer, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, being one -- to the event as a sort of "thank-you" party and promised not only the pub quiz (pitting the clients' employee teams against each other) but free booze and food, too.

I managed to sneak in under the guise of working for Enterprise's "car-prep" department and joined Claudine and four of her accounting co-workers. Our coalition sextet consisted of three Britons, two Americans (us) and a South African.

Questions were organized into categories, such as literature, sport, geography and so on. The announcer would call out the questions and each team would write its answers on a piece of paper. After only a few questions, it was immediately apparent that Team Enterprise was at a disadvantage. Approximately 20 to 25 percent of the questions had something to do with Britain, such as, "At what northernmost latitude in Wales did John Barker III win the record for continuous pipe smoking?" or "What was the name of the salon that King Henry the VIII had his hair done?" (No, those aren't the real questions, but you get the point.) As I generally consider myself pretty poor with trivia to begin with, you can probably imagine the further depths of ineptitude I sank into when the British questions were posed. Luckily, Claudine and Juan, the South African, faired little better, so at least my failings were somewhat masked.

At the half-time intermission, we were in 11th place out of 14 teams. Looking to place blame on something other than our feeble grasp of all things trivial, I decided that every one else was cheating. (You know it's true: think of all the accounting scandal and "cooked book" news stories you've heard the past couple of years.) I figured that any participant with a cell phone -- which was likely everybody, actually -- could be texting a mate back home and having him or her look up the answers. A sort of secret "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" life-line call, if you will. Why, just today, I stumbled across a web site for internet-enabled cell phones that contained answers to popular pub quiz questions.

As the second round started, I told our team that our main mission "was not to come in last." It wasn't looking good, though. We were getting clobbered on the literature and "general knowledge" categories. At the end of the round, I was sure we were last. We had even drawn a blank on this American-biased question: "What does the postal ZIP acronym stand for?" The scores were tabulated and the announcer read out the results. (What follows in quotations is not verbatim, but more of a mental recreation of what I believe the announcer said. I had downed more than a couple free bottles of Becks by this point, you see.)

"In last place is NGO Development," the announcer said. My hopes rose a bit. Maybe we hadn't done as bad as I had thought. He continued: "If you remember, NGO Development was doing quite well in the first round. However, they all got so pissed by halftime that they all went home. In 13th place, then, we have Enterprise Rent-A-Car…"

Oh, how very humiliating. We had edged out -- just barely -- a team of drunks.

On the way home from the pub, I thought about how we would have done better if there had been different categories. For instance, we could have lucked out and gotten "cars," "musicals," "Star Wars," "the South African military" and "Audrey Hepburn movies." Still annoyed about not knowing what ZIP stood for, I recalled that episode of "Cheers" that featured Cliff Clavin appearing on the game show, "Jeopardy." As luck would have it, Cliff breezed through the Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy rounds thanks to categories he was intimately familiar with, like "stamps" and "The United States Postal Service."

(That episode also has one of the great quotes from the show. Cliff was in a commanding lead for Final Jeopardy, not needing to risk anything to win. Alex Trebeck, playing himself, posed the Final Jeopardy answer. It was "Archibald Leach, Bernard Schwartz and Lucille LeSueur." Cliff had no idea. When it came time to reveal his question on the TV screen, he wrote, "Who are three people who have never been in my kitchen?" Cliff had bet everything on the Final Jeopardy question and lost.)

Suffice to say, I don't plan on going to any more pub quizzes. If anyone wants to come over and take me on in a riveting game of "Go Fish," however, I'm ready.

(If you want to know, ZIP stands for "Zone Improvement Plan." I had to look it up. And the correct question to Cliff's Final Jeopardy answer was, "What were the real names of Cary Grant, Tony Curtis and Joan Crawford?") << REWIND