Why I'm Useless on a Trivia Team

I am smart, but Trivia games are not for smart people.

A few years ago, I went to a bar with my friends and they were participating in a trivia game night. And to this day, we still do trivia nights together. And every damn week I suffer my way through it. Let me give you a few categories that make me scream because I know nothing about them:

Sports

Medicine

Science

Mail Services

Music

Quotes

Trains

Alcohol

Anatomy

Finance

I can hold my own in Literature, Movies, and History but the rest of those categories can go right to hell. The Post Office questions are fucking ridiculous. We got a question in the category once that went along the lines of this: The zip code was not a standard until the 1950s, What preceded it? You know what the answer was? “Nothing” just regular addresses.

For Anatomy, we once got “Name the muscle that is between the armpit and the hip.” We had no clue. I don’t even remember what the answer was, I just know that no one got it right.

Even the Music questions are fucked up. “Name 3 of the 4 top 100 songs of 1986 that doesn’t include Michael Jackson or Madonna.” Or “Who won best song at the Grammys in 2002?” Sometimes those questions have years in them that you know you should know but it happened such a long time ago that all you can remember from 2002 in Ugg boots and J.Lo.

The three categories I am good at come up so rarely, I am barely useful on the team.

Lately with the pandemic we’ve been having trivia nights over zoom, which is way worse. Because it’s just me, and I am always in last place. We’ve been doing this for 15 weeks and with every passing week my team has realized that I am the weakest link. They only keep me around because I am good at the three categories they don’t care about.

To be perfectly honest with you, sometimes even those categories I have nothing.

We had a History category one time and everyone was like “oh here we go, your time to shine!” And this was the question:

“Name the third person in line for the Swedish throne in 1763.”

What. The. FUCK. Am I supposed to do with that?

I know nothing, NOTHING, about the Swedish, okay?

As a joke, my friends send me links to Swedish History websites after that night.

I like to think I’m smart. But sometimes life knocks us down a few pegs in the humility department and tells us to Google Swedish History Facts.

So, why do I continue to be on a Trivia Team if I seem to continuously suck at it? Well, it’s primarily because of my friends.

They’re quirky, and sometimes they even get on my nerves, but they welcomed me like an old friend the first night we met. We drink, we laugh, we win, we lose, we drink some more. One guy gets perpetually pissed off during questions where you can bet points so teams that were in last place somehow jump to first. One gets candy for the group but keeps the good stuff to herself. One is friends with the bartender so her glass is never empty. The host is goofy and awkward but she fits right into the crowd of misfits at this bar.

It feels amazing when we win, when we get a perfect game and win first place and do a victory dance around the bar.

But when we lose, we equally enjoy booing the other teams that were ahead of us.

It’s all just playful banter and good sportsmanship, which isn’t something that I see every day.

I may not be good at basic trivia questions, and especially not at specific Swedish questions, but my team welcomes me back every week.