Month: October 2008

BFF of the Month

Well, the BFF of the Month selection process turned out to be about as confusing as the 2000 elections in Florida.

Pete the Trivia Guy was absent, so he left questions for Mikey, who stood in for him as trivia master.  After two rounds it was close – the Rapscallions were in second place, St. Jude team in third.  If the St. Jude team did not beat us, their team members Jenny and Michelle would lose the chance to be my BFFs of the Month for October, and it would instead go to Lauren, Best Pool Partner Ever and Calhoun’s bartender.

Round three was extremely close.  We got most of them, and I kept an eye on the St. Jude team and it looked like they did too.  The final 30-point bonus question actually had 5 answers worth 6 points each.  “That’s going to be a mess to score,” I thought.  “Pete shouldn’t have left that for someone else.”  It was a TV question, so I backed off and let the Nuh-Uh Girl and the other TV experts work it out.  They got 3 of the 5 correct answers.  I breathed a sigh of relief, figuring it was enough.

When Mikey announced the St. Jude team in third place, I was pretty sure Lauren was the new October BFF.  Our score, 144 out of 186 by my math, was surely good enough for a prize.  “Second place, the Weiss Asses,” Mikey said.  “And in first place, the Rapscallions.”  We had won.  And so had Lauren.

Jenny and Michelle came over to congratulate us.  They know how to be gracious losers because they’ve had a lot of practice over the past month.  “We did well though,” said Jenny.  “We finally won a prize.  And we didn’t score badly, we got 146 this week.”

“What?” I said.  “Let me see your scorecard.  I had our team at 144.”

I added their scores up.  Sure enough, it was 146.  A few of their team members who were good at math, and verified us at 144.

At that point, we went and got Mikey, who was at the bar drinking a beer, trying to recover from adding up all those partial scores from the final question.  He went into the back room and pulled his tally sheet out of the trash.  Jenny, her British voice rising to octaves never before heard at the Saucer, explained her score to Mikey.  “I had you at 134,” he told them.  But inspection of the tally sheet revealed that sure enough, that 5-answer, 30 point disaster bonus question Pete had left had caused the problem.  They didn’t get credit for 12 points.  So their total was a legit 146.

“I should’ve thrown that question out and replaced it with one of my own,” Mikey told me later.  “I knew it was going to cause trouble.”  He had thrown out the question before and replaced it with, “What car was described as a ‘one-car accident’ in Unsafe at Any Speed,” and I was amazed that most teams didn’t know it was the Chevrolet Corvair.  Mikey’s good about going through and removing Pete questions that cause confusion, but this time the bonus slipped by.

So the St. Jude team FINALLY beat us, 146-144.  That means that it’s time to announce my October BFFs of the Month…

Michelle and Jenny.