The Fourth Floor Quiz, and Its Aftermath

The intention, as stated in the email, was something light. Six rounds, teams of four, forty minutes, back at desks by one.

What arrived was twenty-three people, five teams, and a table by the window containing four individuals who had clearly discussed strategy in advance and had allocated categories.

The trouble started in round two, which was a picture round, and which contained an image the quizmaster had sourced badly and which two teams identified as two different things, both defensible. The window table appealed. There is now a word for it on our floor and the word is appealed.

It ran to seventy minutes. Nobody was back at their desk by one. The quizmaster, who did this as a kindness and spent her own Tuesday evening on it, spent the last twenty minutes adjudicating rather than reading questions, which is not the job she volunteered for.

It was not close. It was never going to be close, and by round four everybody in the room had worked that out, and the last two rounds were played by four teams with the specific energy of people finishing something.

The prize was a box of biscuits. They took the biscuits. They opened the biscuits and offered them round, which I want to record because it complicates the version of this story everybody on the floor has been telling since.

What nobody says out loud is that they were not doing anything wrong. They turned up to a quiz and answered questions correctly, and the thing they are quietly resented for is caring about the stated activity at the stated time.

The floor wanted a social event with a quiz attached. Four people came to a quiz. Nobody wrote that difference down anywhere, and you cannot lose a game you did not know was being played.

It was not announced. There was no email. It simply became true over about a day and a half, the way things do on a floor.

As far as I can reconstruct it, one person said it in the kitchen on Thursday afternoon, three people agreed, and by Friday morning two separate colleagues told me the rule as though it were established policy.

This paper covers one floor of one office and the single most interesting thing about the job is watching a rule arrive with no author. There is no vote and no meeting. There is a sentence in a kitchen and then, quite fast, a fact.

Ninety questions written, forty-eight used, images sourced, a scoresheet made in a spreadsheet with the rounds already laid out. All on her own time, for twenty-three colleagues, unasked.

Since Thursday she has been told about the picture round by four separate people. Nobody has been unkind. Every one of those conversations was framed as being helpful for next time.

I want to write the obvious paragraph about thanking people and I am not going to, because the obvious paragraph is not the useful part. The useful part is the asymmetry: forty-seven questions worked perfectly and generated no comment at all, because a question that works is invisible and a question that fails is a topic.

So there is nothing available to her from Thursday except the one thing that went wrong. That is not the floor being ungrateful. It is what feedback is, if nobody deliberately does the other half.