Quiz night

For those of you fellow fans of the original and only “The Office” you will appreciate our adventure last Friday night when we attended our first Quiz Night. Working at the Nelson City Council has its advantages (and disadvantages, I’ve found, as apparently all the elected servants on the Council are despised in the city—great dinner party talk I discovered on Saturday). Last week at work an advantage presented itself to me via an email from the Social Club.

Yes, my office has a Social Club. For only $1 per week you can catch up with fellow work mates outside the office, do fun things, get discounted movie tickets and bar nights at local pubs. Being a temp, well, to put it correctly, that’s temppc2, I have no official name or presence and still don’t attend staff meetings. As such, I cannot belong to Social club and I’m not really considered one of the 218 staffers at the NCC (learned that at Quiz night, yep). So, I thought I’d just invite my damn-self to this function, first to see what a real quiz night was like because my only knowledge of it was from The Office, but also to meet people and socialize. How out of my body was I that day??!! And I asked if Don could come along, seeing as how we were new in town—of cooourrrse, they said. Partners are always invited. Partner is used here almost exclusively, the PC term. Did I mention that? I’m getting déjà vu.

Anyway, so we were matchmade to a team of others on floor 2B like myself and we had a grand time. Two Americans and two Kiwis plus partners. It was a lot of fun and exactly what The Office told me it would be. You CAN learn a lot from TV!! And quite competitive. Our team was in first place for 4 of the 10 rounds after a stellar—and I do mean sterling—performance by Jen and myself (the two American gals) on the category of Sit-Coms. Due to the Americans' admitted expertise in the subject of television, the group chose the Sit-Com category to be our bonus category. This meant we got double points.

The round came up and we got a page of photos for which we had to identify the name of the sit-com pictured. PIECE of cake. Jen lead us and wrote down all the answers. Hellooo perfect score. But wait, bonus points!!! If you can write at least one actor from the sit-com, you get a second point. My expertise took over and I grabbed the pen and paper and cranked them out. WOO HOO, we rocked.

Alas at the end, the smart teams won the day and we came in 4th out of 8 or 9 teams, stalling on the end on the categories of Quotes and General Knowledge. I shouldn’t even tell you what we scored on the category of Nelson City Council, where you are tested on how much you know about your peers and the Council. All four employees at the table had been in their jobs less than 3 months. It was a miracle we got 3 out of 10 right. [Angela forgot to mention that I almost singlehandly carried the Agent 007 category]

This Monday morning there was a small rehash of the Quiz night activities in my area, as my colleague Jungle, who was on the winning team last year, gave his apologies to a teammate for calling in sick. The teammate seriously stood there and said, Well, mate, we came in second and that’s okay, I guess. I think you have to let others win some of the time, you can’t hog it, you need to spread it around to others. RRRrriight.