Week 292: On Ownership
And bequeathing, and letting go
Ahead of the Monday night pub trivia, the company releases a clue to one of the questions. This is a common practice with companies, to give a reward to the observant and faithful subscribers to their social media. Monday’s post was a picture from photographer Dorothea Lange, along with her name in enormous big black Swiss721 Bold Extended letters, for those of you who needed the other pieces of data. I didn’t for I claim ownership over all photography questions I may face.
Ownership is a concept I tend to discuss with my teams. It’s the above average confidence one feels about a subject that comes from experience with it. Usually that confidence is derived from picking that subject over a hundred others and having it come up for you. It is hard work finally paying off.
In this case I claim ownership over photography as a subject because I wrote the NAQT You Gotta Know on photographers. So I proceeded to reread my article and made sure I remembered as much of what I had written and researched for it. I was as prepared as possible for the game.
Ownership implies that you are taking responsibility for those questions in that subject. My teammates had noted the name but hadn’t had the context so when I mentioned that I had some experience in the subject, they took notice and gave me the pen. I don’t usually bring that level of confidence or boasting to any competition, I tend to be of the opinion that unless you’re getting the explicit up front promise that “THIS IS A THEME ROUND”, writers will always stray from the path you expect from them. But in this case, my teammates took notice and evaluated my confidence correctly.
During the round, it started off with questions that weren’t on the You Gotta Know, and more directly bar trivia (a comic book character who is also a newspaper photographer, a ten-letter word for a photography enthusiast combining words for a camera part and an insect) but as questions got more obscure it went right into that article’s wheelhouse, asking for Dorothea Lange as the answer from clues I included in the YGK. By the time the seventh question for seven points came through the host was boasting it was a stumper, but I had had the answer (also listed in the YGK) from the first two words (his real name, which upon reflection I should have included in the paragraph on him.)
When we completed the round, I sent the team the link to that YGK, noting that those get posted for the express purpose of making sure that everyone on the team could answer those questions, even if I wasn’t here the next time the subject would come up. At that exact moment, that information’s demonstrated value was at its maximum, so the likelihood they’d read it and learn something from it was maximized. Part of the value of ownership of a subject is that you have to make it easier to pass that ownership on to your friends and teammates. My confidence in my familiarity with the knowledge came from researching what I thought would come up, writing the piece, evaluating the facts that would be useful, and then having it available for later review by me. But it also meant I could bequeath my knowledge to others. It might not be as in depth for them because they didn’t perform their own creative process, but they are getting some knowledge transferred to them by that.
Ownership of a subject is implied when you feel you have an unfair advantage in a subject. And it is the collection of unfair advantages that makes the individual more feared in quiz bowl. Accumulating advantages for the individual is additive to the team’s value, but when the individual gives that same advantage to their teammates by giving them that same information the advantage is multiplicative.
After the Reunion
There were only 70 people who graduated in my high school class, and there weren’t many of us who were in range on Saturday night, and most of the organizers didn’t have their yearbook to even start a methodical search. I counted 18 of us who made it to the reunion, and there was a certain hierarchy in telling the story everyone wanted to know: “what have you been doing in the past 34 years?” There were probably a core ten people who kept in decent touch with each other there, and those didn’t really need updates from each other, which meant we probably completed the debrief in two hours. I probably wasn’t the most successful of the class of ‘91, (we’ve got a guy retiring from the Navy Yard next year who came from behind,… and expulsion) but I guess of the ones whose stories they didn’t know I certainly had the best ones.
Catie had asked me in the days before this: “why would you want to go back to see these people?” to which I replied, “I want to check who I’ve outlived.” and sure enough there was a list, four of the class of ‘90 and five of my class have passed away. But really, I just wanted to exorcise a few demons that weren’t hurting me any more.
The next day I was covering Catie’s band hoagie sale at the festival, and I sold one to another classmate, who wasn’t at the reunion, and if I am guessing from his demeanor and our conversation, wasn’t found by the organizers. Catie, coming back from getting an apple cider slushie, asked how I knew him, and I told her, and then she asked if he bullied me. I said no, he probably got about the same from people, and then I caught her off-guard in saying that in a class that small there’s a lot of that that was flying around, everybody got some incoming, nobody got through it unscathed, though we probably didn’t notice the impact on other people at the time.
And then I think she realized why I did go. To confirm that it didn’t matter and I had let it go a long time ago. We’ll see if the lesson sticks.
Two small thoughts that came to me this week about previously written things:
In the book, I try to make the distinction that where a particular type of question cannot be delivered in media, it will not be rendered in that media. So televised quiz bowl cannot easily work with music in the same way it can easily incorporate still images. Pub quizzes have the opposite problem, it can easily incorporate music, as the host for pub quiz is often also a DJ for other nights at a bar. But pub trivia can’t easily incorporate the image on screen. The venue can’t afford to give alternate screen time to the game in a bar that’s displaying sports from all places. So often if there’s a visual clue or round in pub trivia, it’s on a worksheet with its own subset of rules.
In our discussion of raccoons and the Toronto’s attempt to defeat their efforts to open trash cans, we had a quote from Columbo’s pilot episode.1
Lt. Columbo: You’re probably right. He sounds just too clever for us. What I mean is, you know, cops, we’re not the brightest guys in the world. Of course, we got one thing going for us: we’re professionals. I mean, you take our friend here, the murderer. He’s very smart, but he’s an amateur. I mean, he’s got just one time to learn. Just one. And with us, well, with us, it’s - it’s a business. You see, we do this a hundred times a year. I’ll tell ya, Doc. That’s a lot of practice.
I had tried too hard make it relevant to quiz bowl, and kept focusing on the relation between writers and players. That was the wrong tack. What I really should have done was make this about the difference between circuit play and those on television for their first time. In that light, we have a very clearly analogous relation with one side having one chance a year, maybe, and one with over 100 chances a year to turn a game result into practice.
Sentences like this are half of why you subscribe to this, I know.