I attended a well organised charity quiz by Baker Tilly last night with a team of work colleagues to complete against fellow lawyers, accountants, bankers and financial advisers. An opportunity to test your knowledge and impress your colleagues or be ridiculed by colleagues for your lack of knowledge.
I was astounded by my colleagues’ range of knowledge from the typical science and nature rounds through to history and geography. Most of us have our specialist subject, things that genuinely interest us and we are passionate about. We retain massive amounts of information, irrelevant details and stuff that may come in handy if we happen to be at a quiz.
With the popularity of these events as social or networking occasions or fund-raisers, I get to three or four a year and I recognise that I am there to make up the numbers for my team. My retention of general knowledge is in my opinion, reasonable but it would seem that everyone else also knows the same as me. I have recognised that unless I really know the best policy is to remain quiet.
But we all crave that two seconds of greatness of knowing something the other team members do not. Being confident that you really do know it and not talking yourself out of it or allowing the others to do so. It is an odd moment, it only last seconds but you live on that moment and talk about it for the rest of the night. For all of the bad guesses, the “oh I was about to say that” or “yes that’s it, definitely right” you tend to only remember the two or three questions that gave you your moment of glory amongst your peers.
Sadly they chose to remember your atrocious spelling when given the unpopular role as scribe for the evening, or the question which should have been your specialist subject that you got wrong.
A good evening was had, we came 6th out of 16 but having been last at the half way point, the food break clearly was the turning point!
Mark Sage Blogs 