Semi Triumph at The Quiz Night.

On the night of 20/06/2007, a quiz night was held in the grounds of Flux. It was a prestigious event in which at least 20 teams of around 4-5 members competed against each other in a battle of general knowledge.

Bikesure staff were involved in three different teams but there was one team which really did show their true worth, my team. The Arsehole of Flux. There was a bit of drama right at the last minute before the event. Two of our members dropped out Charlie and Faye (quite clearly not team players). Thankfully two other members from the bikesure team stepped up to the plate. Richard “The Horn” Rowsell and Ros “The Horn’s Missus” Hindry. So the dream team consisted me, the Captain Kyle “Minty McMint” Benefer, Grant “Cheese on Toast” Varnham, “Ginger” Jon Mellish, and the pre mentioned Richard and Ros.

So the scene is set, the dream team is at full strength. We had a combined general knowledge similar to a small principality so things were looking good. We strolled into the quiz marquee, almost reminiscent of the Reservoir Dogs scene, apart from the guns and the blood stained shirts. They weren’t needed on this occasion.

As we all settled down to begin the quiz, the tension was slowly increasing to boiling point. Quiz master Paul Twite was getting the punters going by banging out a usual set of poor jokes based around extracting the urine from some of the better known staff members. Then it came, the moment of truth, the first round. There were six rounds all consisting of twleve questions. Each team was given a “joker” which gave you double points for the one round you decided to play it in.

The first round was on music. A lot of teams played their joker in this round. The Arsehole of Flux held back the temptation to play their joker here, and some would say it was a wise choice. This round came and went and from memory we got 10/12 questions right, so a good solid start.

The second and third rounds passed, and there was an update on the standings, we were sitting pretty in joint third place. There was a very positive attitude in team, happy with our progress so far. We all would have been pleased with a podium finish. We were then handed a bonus round, which consisted of recognising lyrics from certain songs. We done ok in this round about 9/12.

Now for the fifth round, the forth round wasn’t very important. We played our Joker in this round, the subject was tv and film. We played a blinder. All twelve questions right, and as we played the joker in this round we got 24 points for the round. This bumped us up into the top two. What a result!

The final round was in the style of “Guess The Intro”. We got 11/12, the only one we didn’t get was 2000 miles by The Pretenders. What a rubbish song, never liked it anyway. Chrissie Hynde gets on my nerves as well.

And that was it. The end of the final round, just left the totting up of each teams points and for the final standings to be revealed. The results were read out in reverse order, and the general idea from our table was a top 5 finish would be a good result. So when it got to the top three and our name had still not been mentioned we thought that third was excelent, but to our surprise still no Arsehole of Flux, we just assumed that we had missed our name further down the list. What was even more surprising is that were in joint first place. If only we got the 2000 miles question right, I hate Chrissie Hynde so much.

So to settle things there was tiebreaker question. The all important question was “According to Ask.com, how many islands are there in the Maldives?”. The nearest answer would win. Of course an island in the Maldives consists of and lump of sand protruding out of the sea. my first thought was there can’t be more than a hundred or so. No one else had any other bright ideas and so went for the answer of 130. The other team involved guessed at 2000. No one had a clue who was right, but it wasn’t us. The answer was 1300. Gutted we were just one zero out from the right answer.

We went out gallant runners up. Still got £20 each in prize money, so not all bad.