I know I'm trying to write about new things I try, and I've been talking about VFFs while I am still in transition and will continue to write about them, but I tried something else new tonight: WINNING QUIZZO! I'm still beaming with pride over it. Quizzo (also known as pub quiz) is lame, and I know it is so so lame that I so happy about coming in 1st place (yay!), but it's been a long wait and road to get there.So I can't remember how it started, but my friends and I started going to Johnny Goodtimes Quizzo some time while we were in law school (maybe 3 or 4 years ago). It has been, at times, intense. There have been fights over team names, picking teams when we had to field 2 teams and of course over the right answer. Questions of morality have been raised, feelings have been hurt and being the douchebag law students-turned lawyers that we are, we have at times been a tad intense and serious about quizzo. That said, we have never been serious enough to "train" or study trivia or recruit quizzo superstars to join our team. We never cheat with our cell phones (except for once when some outsider was on our team, looked up the answer on his iphone and got it wrong - talk about instant karma). Some teams do some or all of those things though, and competition is tough at Johnny's quizzos (he runs like 5 regular quizzos a week at different bars). There is the favorite team or two to win at each quizzo. The top 3 teams at each quizzo win a GC to the bar they're at, so it's pretty cool if you can win.
Now my friends are in general pretty intelligent people, but quizzo isn't just about intelligece, it's about trivia. So someone can be pretty smart, but might be bad at trivia. You seem to need to have a collectively broad spectrum of trivia knowledge to always do well in quizzo. Just like trivial pursuit. I can answer the blue and green questions forever, and maybe even some orange and yellow, but I'm not going to win without a partner whose got a handle on pink and brown. (click here in case you can't remember.) So we are all fairly smart people, but collectively we weren't a trivia powerhouse. So in the past we probably could have counted on getting 6th or 7th place, solidly in the middle of the pack, with a 2nd place or 3rd place here or there when we happened to get a lucky topic some of us knew about. One amazing day when Ryan and I weren't there, our friends came in 1st. But overall, it was social, fun thing for us to do on Thursday nights since we certainly weren't favorites to win. I actually used to hate quizzo when we started because I hated losing, but at some point I lowered the bar and only expected to come in somewhere in the middle and started liking it a lot.
After law school, team members started moving away or their work schedules didn't allow for them to stay at a bar in center city past midnight on a weeknight, so we stopped going to quizzo. But, maybe a couple months ago a few of us were free and in the area and decided to go, and we got 2nd place! Pumped and enthused by what would have been a big deal to us before, we went again the next week and got 2nd place again! We haven't made it to quizzo every week since then, but we've been there pretty regularly, and I think we came in 2nd place every time except for once, plus tonight when we came in 1st! The team we beat almost always wins and was winning back when we were in law school coming in 6th place every week.
So when Johnny read the scores, and he read the 3rd place team and our team hadn't been called yet, I just assumed we would come in 2nd as usual. And when he called our team name, "The April Fools," as the winners, the 5 us (two of whom I should mention are not and have never been lawyers or law students) threw our hands in the air and cheered as loudly and happily as when the Giants beat the Patriots in the superbowl a couple years ago. My hands were actually shaking, and I had trouble texting past members of our team to let them know of our victory. Within minutes we had pictures of our $40 GC on facebook.
It's all so so so geeky. I know that it is, and I hate myself a little for being so happy about this, but it's just one of those things that feels good with no bad feelings attached. The kind of happy you get when you're a kid when good news doesn't come with a downside too, like it often seems to now. For example, you graduate law school - yay... except you don't have a job and the bar exam is looming over your head. Or, yay you get a promotion... but now you have all this extra work and no time for quizzo. This was high-fiving, smiling from ear-to-ear, hoot and hollering kind of happy, and it just felt good.
So congratulations to Ryan, Parveen, Todd, Elana and myself!
For you VFF junkies out there, I did wear them yesterday for a full, very long day of a lot of walking and standing, and my feet didn't hurt at all like they probably would have in regular shoes, but my calves were really tired at the end of the day, which I have never felt before just from standing and walking around.
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