MDN News - Saved by good timing

I wouldn’t want you having another sleepless night wondering about what happened at the Rugby club on Thursday night, and worrying whether the Morally Deficient Numpties were up to their old tricks again. So I’ll tell you now – it was a cracking good quiz , and a cracking night. There were only the three of us in our team, but though I say it myself I was on form, and we gained a win against the odds. Judging by the scores the team featuring the two MDNs who were phone cheating three weeks ago were playing fair again. We took an early lead in the first round, were level pegging after the second round, then behind after the 4th round, then in the lead after the 5th round, and it was a lead which we managed to increase a little further by the end of the quiz. We were even one of the highest scoring teams on the picture quiz, which almost never happens. As the late George Formby used to say – turned out nice again, in’t it. Which reminds me of a friend of the family who insisted a year or two ago on extolling the virtues of her George Formby grilling machine, as she called it. However I digress.

During the quiz, only good timing saved my team from what could have potentially been very embarrassing. Allow me to set the scene. We had opened the quiz with a full house of ten out of ten. We also knew 9 answers of the next round, but I didn’t know the answer to the question – “In the Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan film ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ , several time the film shows parts of a film starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. What was the title of that film ? “ It’s a fair question, but if I ever did know the answer, I’d certainly forgotten it since. Now, one of my two teammates was sure that he knew the answer, but just couldn’t think of it. After a couple of minutes he went outside – for a smoke as I thought. Maybe I had just an inkling of what he was going to do, or maybe I just thought that we weren’t going to get it so we should hand in anyway. So I handed in our sheet a minute or so before the teammate came back. He saw that the sheet had gone, and seemed really disappointed. – I’ve got it – he said – It’s ‘An Affair to Remember’ . – How unfortunate ! – I said – or words to that effect. Then he giggled and admitted that he’d googled it on his phone. Oh dear.

Well, thankfully the paper had gone in before he did this, so I can guarantee that our performance on Thursday night was absolutely kosher. I suppose that I can sort of see what must have driven him to it. As much as I hate the phone cheating, so does he, and so I don’t know, maybe there was a touch of administering a dose of their own medicine. I could see that it was driving him mad that he just couldn’t dredge up the answer. But cheating is still cheating however you look at it. It doesn’t matter who’s doing it. I didn’t go on about it, but I did say that I was glad that we’d already handed in because we couldn’t possibly have used his answer after that. I said that we couldn’t complain about another team cheating if we were going to do things like that ourselves, and left it at that. I’ve never known him to do anything like that before, and he didn’t do it again through the rest of the quiz. Still, I can’t help wondering how I would have felt about it if he’d come back before we handed in, given us the answer, THEN told us how he came by it. I suppose you wouldn’t have been able to blame the other two of us too much because we’d have done it unwittingly. Even so, it would have left a nasty taste in the mouth.