224 people, 60 questions

Friday afternoons at the office have always been special. Around 5pm, people stop working and go chill out in the kitchen area, were you can get a beer from the fridge, play pool or foosball and chat with your colleagues. Last Friday was even more special. It's safe to say that at 3:30pm no one was really working any more, and the whole office was buzzing like a hive on a warm summer day.

- "So are you ready for the trivia?"
- "Of course! Our team has been reading the papers for the last two weeks!"

So yes, last Friday was a "trivia night". While you can guess it involves answering questions, the purpose of this event was twofold:

I do not know how common this is in France because I have never been to any such event, but my company here really values team building exercises. Trivia night was one of them, and so is the October soccer tournament. It was indeed a good way to talk to people you don't know that well!

The other aspect of this trivia was fundraising: from time to time, our company organises events to raise money for charity. For example, a few weeks ago some colleagues ran City 2 Surf, a 14km race between Hyde Park and Bondi Beach. Both the trivia and the race were helping fund Bear Cottage, a children's hospice near Sydney that offers rest, medical care and support to children with life-limiting illnesses and their families.

So at 4pm, off we went to the RSL down the road, were we realised that there were 224 people participating! That's 28 teams of 8, which means 27 teams that could possibly be smarter than us :) How it works is that each team gets to sit down, eat some nibbles and drink bear while listening to 3 sets of 20 questions. The questions are only spoken once, and you have about 30 seconds to come up with a smart guess. Of course, all mobiles phones had to be turned off!




So here's a small example of what is was like, so you can get to play as well :) I will give you the answers in a few days!

• Name 6 countries that end with the letter Y, apart from Vatican City.

• Find an anagram of the word "treason".

• Name 3 movies that Brad Pitt starred in that have numbers in their names, apart from Ocean's 11, 12 and 13.

• If it takes 2 hours for two taps to fill a pool, and 6 hours if only the left tap is on, how long would it take if only the right one was on?

• Do Australians pay GST on Kellogg's Coco Pops?

• What are the 3 cities that host the biggest comedy festivals worldwide?
  

While our team did quite well on the first two sets, we almost got everything wrong on the last 20 questions which resulted in an unpredictable ranking. Last! Can you believe it? Well we won some nice chocolates, "lucky last" prize they called it.