The Proclaimers walked 1000 miles, dammit!

So here's the thing.

The office is having a quiz night this coming Thursday. (In my six person team, we have pretty much the entire management of the office, right up to the very top, so that’s a daunting prospect. Must do really well.)

But one of the things I find really intriguing is the way this type of thing has really brought out the competitive nature in people. There’s still two days to go before the actual event, and already the rumours are flying. The chief rumour is that the section of the office that I work in is supposedly conspiring to dominate the quiz. This, so far as I know, is completely unfounded. There is no conspiracy to dominate, and any degree to which we may dominate proceedings on the night would be due solely to sheer force of numbers – the section that I work in is the largest, and so if we do happen to dominate it would just be because we have more people entered.

But these rumours are amplified by something that happened yesterday. Since late last year, a group of us have been getting together in my office each week, depending on whether workloads allow, and doing the Five Minute Quizzes that are published each day in the paper – we collect them up during the week, so by the end of the week we have 50-odd questions and can take a good half an hour to go through them. It’s a nice social time and one of the highlights of the week for me. But yesterday, someone from IT happened to come up here while we were doing the quiz, and heard us going through the questions. They then went straight downstairs and reported to IT that we were (horror of horrors!) practicing for quiz night. Never mind that we’ve been doing this for half a year. And that everyone in our quiz group is on a different team. The rumour of the “practicing” team seems to have galvanised the office. Suddenly I’m hearing stories about people instructing their spouses to go home over lunch and practice using the Five Minute Quiz, people apparently trying to find practice quizzes on the internet, all to try and counteract us. And it’s insane. I though this whole quiz night was supposed to be fun, bringing the different sections of the office together, but instead everyone gets competitive and determined to prove just which section is the best. Mark my words, by the time this quiz night has finished, there will be blood. The office is developing into a kill-or-be-killed, dog-eat-dog environment, and I will take down anyone that tries to beat me. I will not be defeated.