Life in the Form of a Question
There are certain things you expect to do in retirement, a check list if you will:
Start a new hobby – check
Finish the novel that has been in your desk for years – check
Get into a shouting match with a drunken asshole at the bar during trivia night – check
Each Monday night a group of us play trivia at a bar in Annandale (New Jersey). Its a big bar and a very friendly group of teams.
That is, it was until last Monday.
The trivia game is a simple process, each team has a small console where answer are input; questions flash on several TVs behind the bar. Three games, thirty questions each, pick the best response from five potential answers. Before each game there is a caveat: do not use cell phones and DO NOT SHOUT OUT ANSWERS (sorry for shouting).
Of course, the ‘don’t shout out answers’ is hard to enforce since drinking is involved. But its kept to a minimum. You may hear a stray answer from another table and, in fact, as a diversion our group may say an incorrect answer to throw off the other teams. But, as you say, we use our inside voices.
However, on this night, things got heated.
It started low key, a team at the bar was loud, as some teams are. As the night progressed, and I assume drinks consumed, they grew louder and louder. Towards the end of the last game, all decorum was tossed aside, and one player just shouted out answers, like he was shouting at the refs during a football game.
At this point in the game, from my seat at our table, I asked the man at the bar (well, yelled), “Excuse me, but can you please stop screaming out answers to the questions?”
He turned, and the shocked look on his face surprised me. As if what I asked was totally unexpected, that screaming in a bar is the most natural thing in the world (granted, some times, it is).
“What?”
I repeated, this time in a calmer voice, “Can you please stop shouting out answers to the questions. It’s jarring to hear you scream every time a new questions pops up.”
His companion, not sure if it was his wife, or friend, took a good two minutes to climb down off her bar stool and walked (sort of) over to us.
She apologized, and I accepted, then added if she could please get him to stop screaming at the TV. She told us they weren’t even playing the game, which means his actions perplexed me even more.
She went back to her seat at the bar, then heard him say, ‘bunch of guys bitchin’, playing for twenty dollars a game’ (it’s twenty-five-dollars a game, by the way).
I replied we were just trying to have fun but he cut me off and responded, “Hold on there, Karen, I wasn’t talking to you.”
Karen?
Mike from out table laughed and replied (extra loud), “Um, I don’t think he understand what a Karen is.”
The guy at the bar said he would quiet down, then added, “even though I know the answers.” Which, I assumed, was the point of his loud voice in the first place; everyone needed to know just how smart he was.
Finished the last game (which we won).
We sat at our table, a member from another team came up to us, gave me a hug, laughed and said, “You only won because Drew Carey gave you the answers.”
That was hysterical because the drunk asshole at the bar looked like Drew Carey with his gray hair and blacked rim glasses. He also looked like he just came from, or was going to, an ugly sweater contest.
Someone should have told him, lime green is never a good look.
After we paid the bill, I got up to leave and said, “If he follows me when I leave, come outside.”
The asshole at the bar was easily twice my size, but not in the ‘I go to the gym everyday’ way, but more like ‘I go to the bar every night’ way.
Once again, Mike said, “If he does, I’ll be right behind you.”
It wasn’t that I was afraid of him…
...it was just I wanted a witness in case anything happened – one way or another.
Welcome to retirement.
Photo by: Sean Benesh
