Trivia, JoCo Style
After our thrice-postponed fall softball finale was finally played Wednesday night, a number of us headed to Tanner’s for food and beer.
One of the things I’ve found lacking in JoCo is a good place to go for drinks. Most places just seem so…generic. This is not shocking for a county which serves as a veritable beacon of beige construction materials.
Tanner’s is the epitome of the JoCo watering hole, in my opinion. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the place, but there’s nothing right about it either (except maybe the 2 for $8 burger + fries special they were running Wednesday night—really a pretty good deal for an okay burger).
Wrong or right, the room was packed on a Wednesday night. Most of the people were probably there for the cheap burgers, but a good number were also playing trivia. It was standard bar-style trivia: a guy with a mic plays music or movie clips over the PA and asks a question about it.
However, there was one wrinkle I’d never seen before:
EVERY GROUP HAD A LAPTOP.
Seriously. It was open book effing trivia.
Sorry, but what’s the point? To be able to say you’re the most industrious user of Google in the bar?
When the answers were read back, I wanted to throttle people who cheered when they got some of the answers right. Not just because any trivia team worth its salt would have gotten them without a computer, but because all they had to do was type in the title of the song that was playing into the Google toolbar to magically have it spit back the artist who recorded it.
Lame.
5 comments:
That is SO lame.
I would have made loud inaudible noises every time someone read an answer.
What kind of inaudible noises you may ask? Think Steve Carrell in Bruce Almighty.
That is beyond lame. But so typical of the Millennial generation...dudes grew up with calculators in math class.
One of the nice things about (most of) the bar trivia games around town is the complete lack of cell phones and laptops. If you even pull out a phone during the game you can get yelled at. It would be easy enough to cheat but I like the honor-system aspect of it.
Today's trivia "sponsored by Google and 3G"
I agree about the trivia. Effing ridiculous. What's more, they don't even actually have to know a song title to identify an artist. They can just hold up their iPhone for a couple seconds, and Shazam will tell them the artist, album, year, and song title.
Here's what you do: Fight fire with fire. Research a little program called Ettercap and ARP poisoning. You can very simply (and safely/temporarily) take down a wireless access point, levelling the playing field.
Post a Comment