(diaryland) October 16, 2001 - 9:01 a.m.

Rosie and I went to her yearly work dinner thing on Saturday night. We wore name tags. My name tag said, �Clare�. We stood around saying hello to people for a while, and I was all uncomfortable at them. I didn�t know what to say to any of them. What do you say to someone who works at a chemical company?

�So�. What�s your favourite chemical?�

Then we sat down at allocated tables and stuff. Soon, we discovered there would be a sinister side to the night � it wasn�t just a dinner. It was a Trivia Night. I was totally mortified at the thought of yelling out answers really fast and stuff. I suck under pressure. I also realised I wanted to win. When we found out we would be given the questions on a piece of paper to write the answers next to, I thought, cool. We can do this.

After soup, we had the first round. I was feeling kinda competitive. We seemed to be doing OK. We wrote some really silly answers, and some really clever answers. They tallied the answers, and it turned out we tied with another table. So they did a tiebreaker question.

�What is the name of the actor who plays George Costanza on Seinfeld?�

Rosie yelled, �Jason Alexander!� And she was right.

So then we all had to swap tables. We were with a new bunch of people. We ate roast. Then came the next bunch of questions.

These questions were easy. We knew we had them in the bag. We were answering them left, right and centre. We were on fire. Sure enough, we kicked arse. We won again! And we weren�t even completely full yet.

We all had to swap tables again. Then came dessert. We got full. I didn�t like the apple crumble very much, which was disappointing. But it was OK. I wanted more questions. They came. They were difficult. One of them was a football question. One of them was a question about pneumatic tyres. These little suckers were hard. Rosie and I decided we probably wouldn�t win this round, but two out of three wasn�t bad at all. Nevertheless, I think the both of us were totally desperate to win. We were the youngest people there. We needed to beat Rosie�s nemesis, who was sitting at another table and was spattered in glitter. We were also probably the most in need of another decent free feed. The rumour was, a free dinner for two was the prize for being at all three winning tables.

As I�m writing this, With or Without You by U2 is on the radio. That�s one of the things we got right.

Anyway, yeah. We tried not to get our hopes up, but I was goddamn hyper. I meant business. The dude read out the answers. Suddenly, we�d discovered we�d won yet again. We rocked the house. Uh-huh. We won a free posh dinner. We were very gracious. �Oh, thanks, you guys,� we said. �Everyone who was at our different tables helped us,� we said. Then we got the hell out of there.

We got into Rosie�s car and started laughing like demented knowledge demons. �WE ARE THE SMARTEST MAN ALIVE!� screeched Rosie. �WE ARE WINNERS! WINNERS!!!!!!!!!!!� I bellowed. We drove out of the car park, laughing our unearthly maniacal laughs, all the way home. That took about half an hour. Then we got into the house and laughed maniacally at Diane for a while. Then Roland and Tristan came over and we laughed at them maniacally for a while. Then we watched TV.

Fuck, we�re smart. Of course, we won�t let it get to our heads.

loser.