Trivia Tussle

The French have a wonderful phrase, "l'esprit de l'escalier." It's the sensation of thinking of the perfect comeback too late after the fact. Tonight, I experienced the thrilling rush of the opposite feeling -- having the right comeback leap immediately into your brain, and saying it.

I also came as close as I ever have to getting into a bar fight.

Right about now, those of you who know me are maybe thinking you've somehow found your way to the wrong blog. But let me make it clear, I wasn't really all that close to getting in a fight -- just as close as I've come. Mostly, the significance comes from the fact that I just don't go to bars that often.

Thursday night is my gang's weekly trivia night, as regular readers of this blog know by now. Our team, named Unprepared, usually places in the top three. For reasons dating back to before I was a regular part of the trivia team, we have a bit of a rivalry with another regular team named PT-21. We usually trounce them.

But in the last week or two, they've been suddenly been placing very high in the standings. No new people in their team or anything -- they just managed to have a nearly perfect game last week, and after two out of three rounds this week, they again had missed only one question.

Well, after the round two standings were announced, we got a little bit snotty. And PT-21 was sitting right at the bar, near the woman reading the questions and scoring the answers. Our team has a bit of a history of writing joke messages to the question readers on the answer slips we hand in, so impulsively (but rather jokingly) we wrote on the bottom of our first round three answer: "How's the cheating going, PT-21?"

Two minutes later: pandemonium. The members of their team are getting into a major argument with the question reader. On the one hand, we're all thinking, "oh crap; we were just playing around, we didn't mean for this poor woman to start getting yelled at." But on the other hand, we're all thinking, "how the hell do you know what we wrote on our slip of paper?" Aren't they basically proving our point?

Well, in the two minutes before that kerfuffle broke out, we'd already written similar barbs on the bottoms of our next two answers, ready to hand in. And we only had a limited number of Post-It Notes, so we kind of had to go ahead and use them.

So in goes our next answer, and the arguing intensifies, and now the manager gets involved. Meanwhile, we're sitting there, letting one of the employees run our answers up to the bar from our table (as per usual). The arguement crescendoes, and a few moments later, team PT-21 moves away from the bar to a table on the other side of the room. But for the remainder of the round, they appear to take turns going up one at a time to renew their yelling with the manager.

Our two-handed feeling intensifies. One the one hand, "Man, these employees really don't deserve to be taking abuse like this!" But on the other, "Why would these people be getting so worked up over something so minor unless in fact they were cheating?"

A few more questions pass, and now the guy that had been coming around collecting answers all night and running them to the bar stops doing so. I have to go to the bathroom anyway, so I grab our answer for the current question and run it up to the bar myself.

A member of PT-21 is there, and starts laying into me. "Why do you have to be so immature, writing stupid notes about us like that?!"

Briefly, I think about saying something snide, but I decide this is so far beyond "not worth it." I say, as gently as possible, "Look, man, I just don't want to get into it," and turn away.

But he steps after me and says, "Hey, come back here and be a man! Why are you walking away from me?!"

"Cause I have to go the bathroom. You want to follow me in there and watch me be a man?"

I have no idea where it came from, or what pushed me to say it. It was just there instantly. And so perfect, I truly had little choice but to say it. I mean, how much would I have hated myself later if I hadn't said it?

Anyway, I turned away again and went to the bathroom. I was not followed.

A minute later, coming back to my group's table, I was still five steps away when they giddily start asking me, "what was that?!"

So I told them the story, culminating my witty rejoinder. One of the group was already cackling as I got to it. She says, "I thought it was something like that. I could kind of read your lips!"

Round three concluded, and somehow, mysteriously, PT-21 had only managed to collect half the points available after moving away from the bar. Now again, we were partly joking when we wrote what we did -- and yet, here they were, proving our point in yet another way!

The final question came, which we did alright on, and we ending up winning the trivia for the night, and $40 off our bill. When the manager came over to comp that for us, we apologized profusely for the trouble we caused. She assured us she knew we were being playful, and that hey, "testosterone and alcohol mixing -- I deal with this sort of thing all the time." Still, we told her we were very sorry to put her in that situation one more time. We also tipped the question reader and question runner for their trouble.

Hopefully, next week will go more smoothly. Which means maybe we won't change our team name to "PT-21 Cheats" or "PT-42 -- Twice the Team They Are," as we were considering early during that third round.