Quiz it better
I hold no truck with people who don't take pub quizzes seriously. Even if you're thick as mince and only competing "for a laugh", you are presumably still there to enjoy yourself, and would therefore be somewhat pissed off to sit through a badly-organised shambles like the one I went to last night.
First thing to note: it started after work at 6:30pm. By 10:45 most of the pub, including the rest of my team, had left with the final results still a mystery, and I simply couldn't be bothered waiting any longer. We had already marked each others' answer papers, so you would think that collating the final scores would be a simple case of totting up the already-written round totals. Apparently not.
There were two guys from another department organising and hosting - I play football with the one, who is basically sound, and was actually billed as the sole host. Sadly most of the talking (and I do mean a lot of talking) was done by his colleague and mate. Floppy-haired, sporting a trying-way-too-hard Flying Burrito Bros T-shirt and backwards baseball cap combo and wasting horrendous amounts of time with his attempts to be cool and funny, he came across as a tool of the highest order. Maybe he's a nice guy too when he's not "on", but I rather suspect he permanently is.
One team sitting behind us didn't help, as they spent most of the evening heckling both hosts, who they clearly knew well, and thereby dragging the rest of us into constant feedback loops of tedious banter and private jokes. There was also lots of swearing, and although I'm no prude I would argue that's not terribly good form at a work event whose goal is raising money for charity and where most people don't know one another well. Sometimes boundaries are a good thing.
It's also worth noting that for the two "interactive" rounds where people were asked to come to the front and sing/mime to team-mates (which were a genuinely fun albeit terribly long-winded attempt to do something different), nobody in the aforementioned heckling team wanted to volunteer, especially not the drunken Canadian lady who was otherwise quite happy to quack away interminably.
The worst quiz I ever did was another music quiz in a pub in Watford where the host, an "eccentric" old gentleman called Spike, also talked complete shit and didn't take it seriously. The difference there was that all the other teams were regulars and clearly mates with Spike, and the in-jokes and tomfoolery were all part of their fun. Last night, a perfectly good quiz on paper was ruined by the absolutely awful, piss-up in a brewery execution. For shame.
Oh yeah, and we lost too.
First thing to note: it started after work at 6:30pm. By 10:45 most of the pub, including the rest of my team, had left with the final results still a mystery, and I simply couldn't be bothered waiting any longer. We had already marked each others' answer papers, so you would think that collating the final scores would be a simple case of totting up the already-written round totals. Apparently not.
There were two guys from another department organising and hosting - I play football with the one, who is basically sound, and was actually billed as the sole host. Sadly most of the talking (and I do mean a lot of talking) was done by his colleague and mate. Floppy-haired, sporting a trying-way-too-hard Flying Burrito Bros T-shirt and backwards baseball cap combo and wasting horrendous amounts of time with his attempts to be cool and funny, he came across as a tool of the highest order. Maybe he's a nice guy too when he's not "on", but I rather suspect he permanently is.
One team sitting behind us didn't help, as they spent most of the evening heckling both hosts, who they clearly knew well, and thereby dragging the rest of us into constant feedback loops of tedious banter and private jokes. There was also lots of swearing, and although I'm no prude I would argue that's not terribly good form at a work event whose goal is raising money for charity and where most people don't know one another well. Sometimes boundaries are a good thing.
It's also worth noting that for the two "interactive" rounds where people were asked to come to the front and sing/mime to team-mates (which were a genuinely fun albeit terribly long-winded attempt to do something different), nobody in the aforementioned heckling team wanted to volunteer, especially not the drunken Canadian lady who was otherwise quite happy to quack away interminably.
The worst quiz I ever did was another music quiz in a pub in Watford where the host, an "eccentric" old gentleman called Spike, also talked complete shit and didn't take it seriously. The difference there was that all the other teams were regulars and clearly mates with Spike, and the in-jokes and tomfoolery were all part of their fun. Last night, a perfectly good quiz on paper was ruined by the absolutely awful, piss-up in a brewery execution. For shame.
Oh yeah, and we lost too.
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