Adventures In Trivia, Act One: The Mojo Rises

I picked up Caroline and Marcia in the Mini and we tooled off to trivia. We ended up with just us and Anne at a ten-person table. Sure, the odds were against us, but I was doping. I’d just taken my first megadose of Vitamin D.

Given it was just the four of us against dozens of tables of ten I assumed we didn’t have a chance, and I thought I’d test my hypothesis. Often my team’s been winning at trivia when suddenly in the final round some other team pulls from behind like Secretariat and wins everything. The winning team always donates their winnings back to the charity.

So I told the host, “Just so you know, if we win we’re donating all the winnings back to [the charity].” Then I made Significant Eye Gestures so he would Know.

The host said, “Well, there’s not that much I can do to influence that. Winning’s really all up to you.”

As usual, we were always in first or second place, but then one round we scored a point higher than we thought we should. Caroline noticed, because she has advanced math skills.

I started to get worried. Caroline had already calculated how handy the winning pot would be divided by four, and it was a tidy profit.

At the very end, we lost to some other team by one point.

Sigh. Anne left. Others cleaned up. I went to congratulate the other team who was not even paying enough attention to know they had won, and come to find out they didn’t even offer to donate their winnings back to the cause. So I didn’t even feel good about hypothesizing that the fix was in.

Then I heard “Ellen! Come HERE.”

I went back to our table where a bystander said, “You guys won!”

“They entered the numbers wrong before,” someone said, dryly.

“No, we tied,” Caroline clarified.

Representatives were called to the front from the two winning teams. Caroline stood up for us. The emcee explained that either there would be a series of tie-breaking questions, or the two winning teams could spilit the pot.

Caroline jumped in. “Well, we’re going to donate our winnings anyway -“

The emcee interrupted, “Well, that’s what we’ll do then. Congratulations to you both!” and it was all over.

So, doping and bribery triumph! We were pretty jazzed afterward. We could not lose! We had the Mojo.

Next in Adventures in Trivia: The Mojo Fades, and then Rises Again.