Wednesday 14 January 2009

Tigers and trivial pursuits

Work is getting busy again. Finally. It was a bit too quiet over the last few months for my liking, especially after the redundancies, but now it seems to be picking up a bit. Tea breaks are once again a welcome break whereas the past few weeks they had been merely a diversion. Over the Chrimbo/New Year period tea breaks had been too much like hard work, having to get up off our seat, go through to the canteen, pour a cup of tea, make conversation, etc, when we could have been continuing our game of trivial pursuit or finishing off that book. Unfortunately I did not win either of the two games of trivial pursuit over the Christmas week shifts. Both games had four teams and in both games Creamy Chicken John took the trophy (or he would have done if there had been such a thing). Managing to complete my circle in the first game I went into the second game quite confidently but failed to complete my counter managing only three or four pieces of pie whilst Gareth and Barry laughed at my answers. One of the questions was: which fiery feline group covered Blondie's The Tide is High? The answer was, of course, 'Atomic Kitten' but sadly I could not think of a 'fiery feline' group for the life of me. After racking my brain I came up with an answer. It had to be a last ditch attempt anyway so I answered with, 'The Exploding Tigers'.
Many dubious questions and answers continued with the pies themselves becoming another case of contention. Are they pies? Our household had always went with pies but it was quite surprising the names other players in the office came out with. Growing up, Trivial Pursuit was a game I used to play quite a lot with the parents, aunts and uncles. Usually it would be on one of our many trips to Edinburgh to visit my Uncle John and Aunt Aileen. We would often go through on the Saturday morning and meet up with them usually with an exhibition trip or picnic planned. In the evening, after another slap up meal on that enormous dining table of theirs and a good few glasses of wine they would bring the infamous game out. Usually I would only stay awake for half the game and leave the adults to finish up which involved a few more drinks and staying up till 4 in the morning. Uncle John and Aunt Aileen always called it pie too.
In the office, Creamy Chicken John called it cheese and another term was cake (I think that one was Mary). We should have just combined the two and called it cheesecake. Strangely enough cheesecake is a delicacy of near mythological status in our tea break collective. DVD Andy yearns for the day when another cheesecake shall be delivered unto us as it is considered a rare and most treasured gift. On Wednesdays gone by, one of the admin women, Margaret, used to treat us to a cheesecake, specially delivered, all the way from Iceland. How she managed that on her bike whilst meeting her murder mystery deadlines I'll never know (that's another story). Nowadays, unfortunately, in these financially unstable times, it is a very rare occasion. The office milk is even getting nicked now every Monday morning leaving us all with black tea all week. I suspect one of those pesky printers... My chief suspect is a printer known enigmatically as 'Spiderman'. He's been known to linger around our canteen at times and walks around, rather oddly, with a farmfoods plastic bag over his right foot. We'll have to get Margaret on the case.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Definitely cheese. It's always been cheese.