So a couple of months ago, I get an IM from a name I recognize, but was no longer in my buddy list since I purge people I haven’t heard from in a certain amount of time.
It was my old co-worker Drew, whom I hadn’t talked to in at least a year, maybe more. He said he wanted to catch up with me, but had a question for me first: Was I any good at trivia? I’m not particularly good at trivia, but I have Google access, so I said yes.
Turns out his friend was on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and Drew and Erin (his wife) were phone-a-friends! They were going to find out in the next 15 minutes to an hour if they were going to be called. Drew would get a call from the show when his friend was in the hot seat, and then it was just a waiting game to see if his friend called him, since he had more than one phone-a-friend.
Drew had set up a server on TeamSpeak, so if you downloaded the software and connected to it, you could talk to other people. He had his phone on speaker, so when a call came through everyone connected to his TeamSpeak server could hear the call. He had about 4 people connected, and we were also in a Yahoo chat, so that when the call came through, we had 30 seconds to type an answer into the chat room, along with a percentage of how sure we were that the answer was correct.
After several minutes of waiting, the phone finally rang to tell them that their friend was in the hot seat. I opened up Google and waited. Finally the phone rang, and it was the host of the show!! (Not Regis, that new lady that hosts it). She said hello to Erin, who had answered the phone since Drew was manning the computer to read our responses, and the host said, “So I hear you’re pregnant!” and Drew immediately IM’s me, “Oh yeah…” Nice way to find out he’s having his first baby! Anyway the host asks the question, “In 2002, Bugaboo introduced a product called the Frog. What was it?” I quickly type ‘bugaboo frog’ into Google, and all of the results are for a jogging stroller. In the background I hear Erin stalling, “Ummm…Frog….hmmmm…..” so I type into the chat, “Stroller. 100%”
Drew relays that to Erin and then I hear Erin saying, “It’s a stroller”. The friend says, “How sure are you?”, bearing in mind she was completely clueless a second ago. She confidently replies “100%” Now, I was the only person who responded (due to various technical difficulties I found out later) so their answer was based solely on me. I had pasted a link of the product description to Drew, but then Aaron said to me, “That’s what the Frog is now – what if it was something different in 2002?” Aah! I hadn’t thought of that. But luckily, the answer was right! I singlehandedly helped this guy get past the $32,000 question!
I’m only allowed to blog now because the episode just aired. We tivo’d it but haven’t watched it yet. Apparently he lost at the next question. Oh well!
