dumb trivia questions — a quiz only i would fail

a dumb trivia questions session would end with me failing in eleven languages and possibly a twelfth. the air fryer used once knows the answers. the good knife, still in its box, knows the answers. i, the player, am the only contestant whose final score is the temperature of a pineapple slice.

that paragraph arrives when i should be reconciling a spreadsheet whose third tab refuses to add up. instead i opened a blank doc and put dumb trivia questions at the top, because something had to.

wednesday, 4:18pm. coffee number two cold at the rim. carla pinged at 9:51 — “in stakeholder thing, back around eleven, please don’t loop me into anything stupid”. i’m reading stupid as a personal challenge.

dumb trivia questions: a category of trivia composed of items so specific, so domestic, or so badly phrased that no normal contestant could win them and no normal host would ask. the kind of dumb trivia questions i collect are written at my own desk, scored by appliances i barely use, and judged by a knife i have never opened.

i’ve been quietly building a working set of these for months. not on purpose at first — procrastination on a quarterly thing whose name i refuse to memorise. now there are roughly two hundred and sixty in a doc called “misc — do not delete (delete)”.

DUMB. TRIVIA. IS. STILL. TRIVIA.

dumb trivia questions, my working set (about two hundred and sixty)

the rule of the working set is simple. if a question can be answered by a normal adult with a phone, it does not qualify. it has to be answerable only by me, by an object in my apartment, or by someone forced through years of proximity to memorise my failures.

some live samples, presented for the first time outside the doc:

1. which microwave, by serial number, lasted the longest in this apartment, and what was the meal that ended it.
2. which yoga mat, of the three currently or formerly here, has touched the floor the most times — under twenty.
3. name the brand of mustard i bought twice, by accident, on the same trip, in the same colour, while looking for milk.
4. identify my phone’s default snooze interval, and how many of those intervals i routinely chain on a tuesday before the building’s hot water runs out.
5. state the ratio of “tabs i mean to read later” to “tabs i mean to close eventually” across forty-seven open tabs as of last sunday.
6. which jacket pocket, left or right, contains the receipt for the lunch i swore i would expense in march and have not.
7. provide the make, model, and ironic acquisition date of the kitchen appliance whose box has not been opened.

none of these are answerable by a stranger. that is the point. dumb trivia questions, in my house style, are a closed circuit — host, contestant, and audience are all me.

mike, at the bar, told me this is “just journaling with a buzzer”. i’ve been thinking about that for three weeks. mike is more accurate than mike intends, which is annoying.

the kitchen trivia, with the good knife as evidence

the kitchen is the densest source of dumb trivia questions in the apartment. it is small, it is overstocked, and almost nothing in it gets used at the rate it was bought for.

example. the good knife. wooden box on the second shelf, two birthdays ago, from an aunt. magnetic clasp. clasp never disturbed. the knife inside is in showroom condition. by any reasonable measure it does not exist. but any quiz that asks “name a knife in your home and describe its last task” will catch me silent.

another. the seventh microwave. this one i can describe without opening anything, because i killed it. trivia question: “which appliance in your home has had the most public funerals.” the answer, every time, is the microwave, of which there have been seven. dave keeps the count.

the air fryer trivia, used once, never opened since

the air fryer arrived in march. one batch of something i would not call food. wiped it. shelved it. plug still in the wall, at this point more decorative than electric.

the trivia question writes itself. “which appliance has been used precisely once and is, despite that, on the counter.” answer: the air fryer. follow-up: “why is it still on the counter.” because moving it would be admitting something — that the third yoga mat in the other room, also used roughly once, is not isolated. it is a pattern. and a pattern, given long enough, becomes a personality.

the pineapple defense, briefly, since it appears

question seven asks about the air fryer, and underneath it, in red, is question seven-and-a-half, which the doc keeps formatting as a footnote no matter how many times i fight it: “is pineapple on pizza fine.”

the answer, on the record, is yes. pineapple on pizza is fine. the rest of pizza is the problem. the rest is what people argue about — crust, sauce, cheese-to-bread ratio, whether the pepperoni curls correctly. the pineapple is, in this whole assembly, the only ingredient with a clear job. it is sweet. it is a fruit. it knows what it is.

it appeared in the set twice, in slightly different phrasings, and i refuse to retire it. dumb trivia questions can include one (1) outward-facing item, as a courtesy.

why my answers count as questions

structural problem with the working set, which i’d like to address before someone — probably mike, possibly mom on a sunday — addresses it for me.

my answers are, in most cases, not facts. they are admissions. “the seventh microwave” is not a fact about an appliance — it is a confession about a man. “the air fryer used once” is not trivia — it is a small biography. when i write “the snooze interval is nine minutes”, what i’m telling you is that on a tuesday i hit it four times before i’m honest with the ceiling.

so the trivia is technically a journal with multiple choice. for a related but different self-test, see the am i dumb test, and the answer keeps confirming.

two months ago a coworker dragged me to a wine tasting where stefan, in a vest, asked which sample was my favourite. i said “the third one”, three being a confident number. stefan said “interesting” the way doctors say interesting. that exchange is now question fourteen.

verdict — the trivia is dumb because i wrote it

stakeholder thing must have wrapped — carla walked past holding a paper cup, lid crooked. she didn’t look at me. i count that as a win, in the same way i count having an air fryer as cooking.

the doc is saved now as “misc — do not delete (delete) — v3”. the v3 is a lie. there is no v1 or v2. but having a v3 in the filename feels professional, and on a wednesday i’ll take what i can get.

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