My undermanned team was runner-up in the weekly trivia contest at Tao Bar. If my teammates hadn’t wimped out and left early to get their precious rest, we probably would have won.
Our Breaking Bad team was leading at the midway point, when my partners Darren, Nena and Jennifer decided to go home. It was only 10:30 p.m. but they said they needed to get some sleep before teaching the next morning. I thought that was a lame excuse, though I confess I didn’t have morning classes to worry about.
I soldiered on without them for the last three rounds (getting occasional, quasi-legal help from my buddy Matt), competing against four other teams that all had at least five members. Answering the questions is a group effort, so I was at a distinct disadvantage.
I knew that a young cow that hasn’t given birth is called a heifer and that C.S. Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, but I couldn’t come up with the scientific term for a black eye (periorbital hematoma) or the capital of Zimbabwe (Harare), even though Pat and I stayed a few hundred yards from the border when we visited Victoria Falls two years ago.
***
The contest was decided by the final question, which asked each team to identify five national flags and say what they had in common. I got three of the five (missing Armenia and Ukraine) and correctly answered that all the flags represented former Soviet Republics. But I still lost because the first-place team aced the whole question.
The winner gets a free bar tab for the night, so my teammates’ decision to abandon me proved very costly. Next time, I’m going to find folks who don’t have to get up in the morning.
