It was a better week at work, largely because one of the people I work with had a back injury last week but was able to make it in this week for part of each day. In a large company like Fidelity Investments, where I used to work, if someone was out with a sickness or injury, you filled in with someone else, and projects didn’t usually suffer unless the individual was absolutely key and their absence was uncharacteristically ill-timed. Contrast that with a company of about a dozen people, where any single employee has key skills and knowledge, so take them out and things grind to a halt. Last week had really been a little crazy, as I had to try and fill in with all sorts of tasks that I’m clearly not trained to do. I muddled through somehow, often learning as I went.
Speaking of knowledge, I’m once again going to see if all this accumulated trivia I’ve collected in my gray matter over the years can pay off or not. The Jeopardy Game show has announced that for the first time, they’ll hold online tryouts. While this means that thousands of geeks will be hunched over their computers firing off answers (and they explicitly say ‘Not in the form of a question this time’) to various Potent Potables, Rhyme Times and State Capitols, I’ll see if I can make it this time. I had tried out in person in Boston some 15 years ago and came very close…but not quite.
In the off chance that I do make it to being a contestant, at that point after the first station break where Alex Trebeck tries to make some conversation with me based on some biographical tidbit on the card, I’m hoping it would be about music, or perhaps moving to Canada (I’m sure he’d like that, being a Canadian himself), and not the fact that as a student I had green hair and once protested Margaret Thatcher. Better not to share any of that, to be sure.
