Went to a quiz evening at our local village pub. Contrary to what one particular person might assume, I do genuinely have enough friends to form a quiz team. If anything, we were faced with the opposite problem. When we first arrived, there were five members, which was the maximum number of participants allowed in a team. Any additional members came at a cost of having five points per person deducted from the team’s score. But as the rounds wore on, various friends would enter the pub and come and sit with us. And why shouldn’t they be allowed to? This was supposed to be a fun game in the social environment of a pub, not some sort of exclusionary academic examination.
In fairness, this didn’t become an issue and the curmudgeonly landlord (who read the questions out himself to save money on a quizmaster, and got us to swap our answers with the next team to save him the effort of marking them) seemed to turn a blind eye to our perpetually increasing team size. Had we won, I’m sure there would have been uproarious accusations of cheating from the other teams. It is a strange feeling to enter a quiz, yet be preoccupied by a nagging worry about actually winning the damn thing. How could the number of people sitting around our table not go unnoticed? Of course we could try to argue that our additional friends were not part of the quiz (officially they arrived too late to have paid any entry fees – though this argument could well be another source of further chagrin), but if you were in a quiz and knew the answer to a question, it would take the same level of restraint as eating a doughnut without licking your lips not to shout out the answer to the nearest team. Consequently, I ended up assessing my friends in relation to their ‘points value’, just in case we happened to win.
I cannot help but resent the obligation to feel any form of guilt during my own leisure time. In an ideal world, I would really like to satirize this ‘points reduction’ rule. I wish to convince everybody in the pub to join together as one solitary team. We may not share much of a prize through our amalgamation, but it’d be a coup to win a quiz with a score of minus 115.
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