triv•i•a
1. Insignificant or inessential matters; trifles.
In
the last installment of this article, I detailed how I (along
with others) drove out a bunch of bigoted bullies from a
movie chatroom. In this installment I’ll detail how
I also purged a group of cheating players from a trivia
website. I must admit I get a kick out of booting
these idiots off these sites. However, it also troubles
me; by acting so aggressively against these nerds, am I
becoming as much of a virulent bully as those who terrorized
the chatroom?
Let
me digress for a moment as to why I would frequent a
trivia website. I have always been an obsessive
trivia junkie, watching Jeopardy! religiously
and playing the National Trivia Network (NTN) satellite
TV game (that's the one you see in most restaurant-bars
here in the U.S. and in Canada). If I’m beginning
to sound a little bit like Cliff Clavin, you ain’t heard
nothing yet. There’s more.
A
few Babblog writers are regulars at a pub quiz. Here's
how this pub quiz works: there are about a dozen different
"quizmasters," and each week a different one
is assigned to write and present 30 trivia questions.
Teams may be comprised of anywhere from one to six players--there
are occasions where as many as sixty people are involved--with
each team competing to see who can score the most points.
There are also usually one or two printed handouts distributed
to the teams which contain additional trivia questions.
The winning team gets a prize of $75, which goes toward
their food and bar tab. If the winning team is small,
this may cover the whole bill; however, if the winning
team consists of a bunch of gluttonous drunks, it probably
won't cover even half the expenses for the night. The
point is, while it's a nice prize to win, it's not exactly life-changing.
A
great time is usually had by all. However, there
was an exception: back in October, one of the
quizmasters wrote a Halloween-themed quiz. One
team that normally never won managed to take first place,
beating everyone else by a substantial margin.
Near the end of the contest, it was revealed by eagle-eyed
observers that this team was getting fed the answers
via text messaging on their cell phones. This
trivia transgression was left unpunished and the players
were awarded their win to avoid a scene. I found
this entire incident to be shattering to my psyche for
one unselfish reason: I was on the second place
team!
After
that,
to avoid a repeat of this unfortunate behavior, the
quizmasters had to make pre-game announcements saying
that the use of cellphones was strictly verboten.
Following this edict, the unscrupulous winners of the
Halloween game never won a subsequent quiz; in fact,
deprived of their “assistance,” this team stopped coming
in altogether.
This
act of perfidy shouldn’t have pissed me off, but it
did. Cheating to win a $75 food and bar tab? At first
I couldn't believe it, but later it struck me as a microcosm
of the unprincipled times we live in. It's as if there's
a current zeitgeist that encompasses corruption and
mendacity, one which is perpetrated by both public figures
and corporations, not to mention the current occupants
of the White House.
As
if this wasn't enough to signal the downfall of civilization,
I found that this trivia cheating situation was not
only limited to quizzes with small monetary prizes--I
also encountered it on a FREE trivia website.
Lemme fill ya in. Surfing the web, I came across
a neat site that has trivia games in five categories,
such as General Knowledge, Movies and History.
The site had rankings for the Top 5 players of the day,
Top 100 players of the previous day and Top 25 players
of the week. I did quite well at it, but something
was really starting to irritate me. I noticed
the same five players were consistently getting perfect
scores in all five categories. Every single day!
Heading to the site’s message board, I noticed other
people who were also angered by this situation. They
explained to me how these bogus Mensa players were achieving
their scores. Apparently, on the site’s home page
there is a link where you can sign in under a second
ID, provided you have a second e-mail address.
Ostensibly, this was designed for two people sharing
the same computer. However, these losers were
abusing the link, playing the game under one ID on the
first round, logging out, and then playing the game
a second time under the other ID. Since the quiz
remained the same for the whole day, they now knew all
the answers, enabling them to get consistently perfect
scores. The thing that amazed me was that this
whole process--playing all 5 categories twice--would
take over two hours! Besides being mind-numbingly
boring, who has the time for this?!? (Despite
what you readers may think, I do have a life, fer Chrissakes!)
I typically only played three of the categories, which
took under half an hour; when I also wrote a post on
the message board, the total time I spent was half an
hour tops.
These
cheaters persisted for so long because the complainers
on the message board were too genteel, refusing to name
names. When I arrived on the scene, though, I
rectified that! I began a “reign of terror” against
these nerds. I called them out by name and humorously
insulted them in an attempt to embarrass and humiliate
them into stopping their cheating. After a period
of time, I was amazed to find out that it worked!
I drove out four of the five cheaters (not to be a credit
hog; I did have accomplices aiding me in this “crusade”).
However, there was one cheater who refused to budge.
He went under the handle of Lion. In his profile
on the site, he claimed to be a college professor.
When I accused him of cheating, saying it was impossible
to get perfect scores in all five categories daily,
he became enraged. The following excerpt was from
his profile on the site: “accused by steve of
cheating along with many more. but lethim prove
it he is all mouth”
Does
that sound like a college professor/genius to you?! Undaunted,
I kept badgering Lion with my insistence that he was
using a second ID, prompting a second post from him:
“steve it is obvious that you have a problem comprehending
what people write, ehen iasked you for an apology it
should have told you i dont have a second id i dont
need one & you know i went & checked the top
100 score board for the previous day except for two
categories & one i hope i would excel i did not
fair much better than you.you remind me of some of the
young men & women who passed through my classes
over the years they would whine all them time. i dont
know what your standards are & don’t care &
certainly dont owe you an explination but i will be
lookin for that apology soon i will reply no further.”
Needless
to say, he didn’t get that apology. As for replying
no further, I was outta luck. He continued to
post his moronic diatribes. However, as time wore
on, even he tired of this and stopped cheating for several
months. As of this writing, he periodically reappears
like Count Dracula, continuing his rampage despite the
metaphorical stakes driven through his cheating heart.
Oh well, I guess you can’t keep a good psycho down.
When
I reflect on the cheaters at the pub quiz and the website,
a disturbing thought occurs to me--if these folks cheat
on something as unimportant as trivia, do they also
cheat on more important matters, ones that could affect
other people in a much more serious way? And are
these people exceptions, or is this a reflection of
human nature?
In
my final installment, I will detail an unexpected political
fight I got into on the message board of the trivia
site, one which deals with the current contentious Presidential
election.
See
ya soon.
Steve
Finkelstein can be reached at steve@babblog.com.
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