Quiz

I can’t tell you how disappointed I am with myself.  The day before yesterday, we had an office Lunar New Year Celebration Virtual Event.  Normally, I wouldn’t bother with this kind of meeting.  However, this one promised a “surprise gift for all participants” and a trivia game.  I’m not going to miss out on a freebie, so I joined.  And then came the trivia game.  I like me some trivia – but when I found out that the topic of this quiz was the Lunar New Year, my expectations were immediately crushed – not exactly in my wheelhouse, and with a lot of Chinese people from the office participating.  But during some “technical difficulties” as the host tried to set up the quiz, about half the questions appeared on her shared screen.  Well, I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth – I scanned the questions and did a quick google search on the ones I didn’t know the answer to.  Nice.  Then came the quiz, 15 multiple choice questions in total.  After 5 questions, I was 5/5 – but so were a lot of other people, so I didn’t appear in the leaderboard.  But after 10 questions, I was miraculously 10/10 and second in the leaderboard – some logical guesswork helping my earlier google searching.  When people have the same score, then the order was decided by time of response – so I was a tad slower than the leader.  But within touching distance.  And then came the 11th question.  A relatively easy question, and one I won’t easily forget.  Where is the largest Lunar New Year celebration in North America?  Of course I knew the answer was San Francisco, but in the heat of the moment I panicked and selected Vancouver, BC because I knew it also had a large Chinese population and thought this might be something of a trick question.  But nope, I was wrong.  Gutted.  But I recovered from this, and by the end of the quiz I had a score of 14/15 – not bad.  And then to the leaderboard – and I finished third.  With about 50 people participating in the quiz, not bad at all!  No one had got 15/15, so I was about 5 seconds behind the leader and less than a second behind second place.  And then I found out that the top 3 people in the quiz won a prize – bonus!  But then came the realization that the prizes were weighted by where you finished – first prize of $75, second prize of $50, third prize of $30.  So I lost out on $20 by less than a second, and $45 by this one stupid question.  So even though I won a prize, I’m not happy at all.  Frustrating.  And ungrateful.