The Most Dangerous Thing in the World

When I was in high school, there was a quiz-bowl show on one of the local TV stations, which was hosted by the weatherman for their evening newscast. During my senior year, my high school was invited to send a team to compete on the show. I was the captain of that team. It was the closest I ever got to being varsity anything. Like any team, we felt the need to practice our craft, so we met a couple of days a week after school in Brother Dave's classroom and we watched old episodes of the show. It seemed like the thing to do. This was a show about trivia questions, so we sat around answering trivia questions. Cross-country runners ran around the neighborhood together. Chess-club members played chess against each other. I tried to be faster than my friends at remembering the chemical symbol for lead.

The show always started out with a rapid-fire round where Weatherman Guy asked 10 "buzz in to be called on" questions to the three teams on the stage. The game alternated between these rapid-play lightning rounds and more relaxed rounds in which each team got a chance to answer questions with no competition, but in the lightning rounds, every question that one team answered was a question that the other teams couldn't. At the end of the show, the winning team got to shake hands with Weatherman Guy, and maybe they got a spot in the playoffs.

The TV station taped a couple dozen episodes over the course of a year, so that a bunch of schools from the greater Cleveland area could have their one shining moment. According to the rules, the nine schools that scored the most points during these preliminary matches earned a playoff spot. Looking back, it probably meant that getting into the playoffs had more to do with the quality of the competition, rather than a team's own smarts, but that wasn't the way I thought of it at the time. On the day of taping for our preliminary round, I got on that stage, listened to Weatherman Guy ask questions, and hit that buzzer just like we practiced. We won! Not to brag, but we also finished with the seventh most points overall for that year. Turns out that knowing random pieces of information could take you places in Cleveland. We were headed to the playoffs!

A few weeks later, that first playoff match went according to the plan. Weatherman Guy asked us about minutiae. We buzzed in. We got it right. We squashed the other two teams. After our victory, I was exhausted, but pleased with the thought that at some point in the future, we'd be coming back down to Channel 5 to tape the final. What I didn't know was that "some point in the future" was scheduled for 10 minutes later. The station wanted to tape all the playoff shows in the same day. It seemed that Weatherman Guy had other plans for next weekend.

Despite the exhaustion, this is what we had practiced for, and adrenaline started kicking in. How often does one have the chance to win a championship in anything, even if it was the nerdiest thing possible? We got situated and the camera operators pointed their cameras at us. Weatherman Guy did his "Welcome to the show ..." introduction that I was now hearing for the second time that day and informed us that the opening round of questions would be about geography. He would say the name of a famous landmark, and we had to identify the country in which it was located.

"Let's get started."

I was ready for this. Our team had already won twice. We were good. We were going to win this one too.

That's when things ran off the rails. Before Weatherman Guy even started asking the first question, someone from one of the other schools rang the buzzer. I knew we were going up against some smart people, but how could someone know the answer before Weatherman Guy had even said anything? That's when it happened. Weatherman Guy still read out the name of the landmark, because even if it was technically a quiz bowl, it was also a television show, and the people who would eventually watch this at home needed to hear the question. Because the other team had technically buzzed in first, they got the chance to answer.

Hang on a second ...

As soon as Weatherman Guy said "correct," I could again hear the sound of buzzer buttons being speed-pounded from the other two podiums, again all before Weatherman Guy even said anything. It took me until the fourth or fifth of these cycles until I realized what the other two teams were doing. To each side of the stage, there was a screen on which they showed the name of the landmark that Weatherman Guy was about to read, in text form. (It was also on the screen for the viewers at home.) As soon as the question appeared on the screen, the buzzer system went live. At that point, it was open season on those big red buttons. It still took a couple of seconds for Weatherman Guy to breathe in, read out the name of the landmark for the viewers at home, then look up to see which team's light was lit. That gave them enough time to formulate a response and have it ready when Weatherman Guy asked for it. The rest was a race to hit the button first.

We got wiped off the stage. I had practiced for a game in which there was a certain cadence of politeness. In the social norms that I grew up with, you didn't interrupt someone before they were done (or before they even started) talking. A quiz show was supposed to be about recalling pointless, but poignant, facts. Buzzing in was supposed to be the indicator that the buzzee had found the answer in their cerebral rolodex. Recall came first, then buzzing. For most of the half hour that we were on that stage, I couldn't move past those unwritten rules even when I realized that the other teams were gaming the system and racking up points because of it. It felt like I'd be breaking an honor code to copy their plan. Unfortunately, the scoreboard didn't care how I felt.

There was never actually a rule that said that we were required to wait for Weatherman Guy to finish — or even start — his sentence or that we had to know the answer before buzzing in. In fact, as part of his opening monologue, Weatherman Guy said that "the team that buzzes in first and gives the correct answer will get the points." The other teams had realized that buzzing in quickly was more important than figuring out the answer quickly. As long as someone on the team was able to pull up the answer within the three seconds that it took for the host to demand it, being a 10 of a second faster on recall than the other team didn't actually matter. In some sense, the other teams won the game before it even started. They didn't ask how the game had traditionally been played. They found a place where the rules were silent and an unenforceable social norm had filled in the gap. Then they found a way to exploit it to their advantage. I had spent my time solving one question —...