And so it was on CANADA DAY, July 01, about 20 years ago or so, that our Country Club held a social, a couples golf tournament which had a bit of a twist to it. Each grouping was made up of 4 couples who would play a best-ball scenario, alternating shots between the spouses. At the first tee, we were handed a sheet of paper with 18 questions, each to be answered at the end of a completed hole.
When the tournament was concluded, all participants would be heralded into the dining room for a dinner, and it was during the course of the meal that the Master of Ceremonies would read out the questions, soliciting an answer from each of the participating groups. A prize was in order for the group with the greatest number of correct answers.
It was a warm and sunny day, and believe it or not, everyone in our group hit the ball masterfully. If memory serves correctly, I think we might have come in with the second or third low net score, but THAT was completely inconsequential because our objective was to blow away the competition when it came to answering the quiz questions.
At the end of the first hole, we read question one on our quiz sheet and it asked, “What is the 8th longest river in the world?" Some of us couldn’t even name the longest river in the world. One of our group just smiled and suggested that collectively we would work out the correct answer.
Each question posed on our quiz sheet was of a similar type. By the time we had completed 4 more holes, the questions continued to stump us, and we presume most of the other participants in the golf tournament as well. For example, who was the 4th mayor of Hamilton, Ontario? Or, how long was the typical Huron Longhouse, or who was the last Viking King of England?
As the day went on, some of the questions were simpler.. such as “how many wives did Henry VIII have? “What was the name of the second person to step onto the moon”? “Who discovered Hudson’s Bay”? As our team pondered each question and sometimes even reached the correct answer, the member of our playing group who was responsible for carrying the question sheet kept quietly smiling and assuring the rest of us that we were definitely on our way to quiz victory. He seemed very confident in our ability to come out on top.
Finally, with the tournament just about over, it was time for our group to brainstorm and come up with answers to the questions that had confounded us on the golf course, and it was then we were formally introduced to ... the Blackberry! Our teammate with the sly smile posed several of our unanswered questions to his Blackberry, and the answers were swiftly forthcoming. Our quiz sheet was completed and we all trooped into the dining room, sworn to silence!
For those of you who want to know what the 8th longest river in the world is…Parana (in Brazil)
Or how many wives Henry VIII had..6
Or the name of the second person to set foot on the moon..Buzz Aldrin
Or who the last Viking King of England was….Harold II (killed in 1066 Battle of Hastings)
The MC for the evening stepped up to the microphone and proceeded to ask, in their proper sequence, for answers to the questions. Table twelve, our table, was shouting out the answers almost before the questions had been asked. After our 5th or 6th correct answer, we could see the MC becoming a bit flushed and disconcerted. After all, how is it possible that our group would have the answers to all of these questions, some of which were pretty unusual?
By the time our group had correctly provided the answers to about 15 of the questions, our MC was visibly sweating. He had, no doubt, gone out of his way to find questions that would be difficult if not impossible to answer and yet here was our group, laughingly responding correctly to each and every question, while the rest of the tables in the dining room became quieter and quieter.
When the MC finally concluded with question 18, one which we again answered correctly, he simply turned to our table and bowed, acknowledging to the room at large that he had never thought, in his wildest dreams, that all of the questions would not only be answered correctly but all by the same group of eight people.
To this day, the secret has never been divulged, and despite the fact that there are no BlackBerrys in use today, that afternoon proved to be a most magnificent triumph for RIM, the manufacturer of the BlackBerry smartphone.
