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death. tax. trivia.
These three inevitabilities rattled and bounced around my skull every Tuesday morning for the better part of two years. The threat of death always remains. Listen to the wooden stairs. The tax threat is not just a threat, it’s a promise. Just ask my shaved paycheck. However, the trivia was something I was looking forward to.
I met up with my friends and fiancé at a local dive bar in Washington, D.C., and answered increasingly difficult questions about geography, science, history, politics, and, my favorite, pop culture. What didn’t you like?
The friendly host showed us around. His soothing voice echoed through the beer hall over and over again. Total of 5 rounds including music round. Although often perplexed, he never flinched. We answered questions using an app on our phones, and there was an honor system in place (although the D.C. area is not immune to trivia cheating scandals).
The stools, which somehow always broke, tilted back and forth as we sat on them, which actually made us feel uneasy, but reassuring in that it was predictable. We were able to win or be in the top three teams on a regular basis.
No, I didn’t know all the answers, and neither did many of us. But guessing and thinking about things was part of the fun. And sometimes we surprise ourselves. I somehow remembered that “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” premiered on E! In 2007.
Sometimes we didn’t surprise ourselves. I still can’t tell you where Idaho is on a map (I was and still am not the geography expert on the team).
And then it happened.
Quiz company Sporcle has acquired our trivia company, District Trivia, and as a result our weekly ritual as we know it has been ruined. This replaced the district trivia format with one that favors random easy questions and out-of-this-world difficult questions. A round usually contained at least 10 questions and one bonus question to bet on, but there were approximately two rounds of eight questions with extra time in between. It baffled us. Fed up with us. Hell, it traumatized us.
We tried to find an alternative location to no avail. Other bar trivia started too late. The human ear has no way of distinguishing the names of lesser-known songs within a single bar of music. Nowhere else did they nail the betting procedure so familiar to us in our first trivia hangout. Were we being boring? of course. But we had something. Something good will happen. And then it disappeared.
Since then, our bar has replaced Sporcle with another company and hosts us on Tuesday nights. We tried that trivia night and although we’re not completely satisfied, we’re comfortable with it. It lacks the magic, the joie de vivre, the je ne sai quoi that our old trivia lives had. But that’s enough for now.
When we reached out to Sporcle for comment for this article, we received a call from Mark Adams, the company’s senior vice president of brand.
He explained that Sporcle trivia still takes place in bars on Monday nights (Music Quiz), and the company offers multiple game formats to satisfy different trivia desires. Was there any thought of using a format similar to District Trivia once the acquisition was complete?
“After speaking with[the previous owner]all of us, including him, felt pretty reassured that this should work for most places. But we also know that not all bars in America are the same,” Adams told me. Changing things always involves risk. But they took some of the feedback they received about adding more questions and debuted them this week in Trivia across the country, including in Washington, D.C.
He also dangled carrots, which were appetizing. “Without giving too much away, we are working hard on longer format works in the future,” he teased.
For now, perhaps, once the former trivia host returns to the bar, a sense of normalcy may be able to align our spirits again. Or maybe it’s a moment where you appreciate not the format or difficulty of the questions, but the camaraderie built at the table.
no. Everyone at that table would agree with me. Questions and format are important.
I don’t ask for much from this life. Well, some people may disagree. But in a world that is teetering on its axis, choosing between politics, climate and media, was it too much to indulge in this wonderful thing? Won’t the winds of change change my joy once and for all?
Oh, I forgot the fourth inescapable axiom. death. tax. trivia. change.
For now, I’m going to go with it and welcome that exciting new Sporcle format when it comes along. “It will be so”, “to the violation”, etc. If you know where these quotes come from, you can join our team.
This story has been updated with new information.
