MORE Amazing True Stories!

Here’s the kind of cutting-edge excitement I have at work some days. Today, I got to take apart a couple of electronic urinal flush valves to try to figure out why they weren’t working.

Used to be that I would never go near that kind of thing - but at some point since I started working at Landmark, my philosophy about trying to fix things has changed. Instead of just looking at something and trying to figure out who would be the best person to call to fix it, I have actually adopted the practice of simply taking apart whatever it is that isn’t working - at least until I get to the part that isn’t working.

Anyway...I didn’t spend eleven hours on that today, but I did spend eleven hours at work. I called the Oriental Inn before I left and ordered some vegetable lo mein (yes...vegetable lo mein), picked it up on the way home, and got home to find Amy - surprise! - feeding Jackson.

By the way, Jackson is one month old today - woo hoo!

Anyway, she was watching TV, and apparently the only thing on was a show called Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? I have avoided this show because it just seems wrong in some way to watch grown men and women embarrass themselves for what are positively obscene amounts of money. Plus Jeff Foxworthy is unfunny.

If you kick ass and take names on Jeopardy!, you can go home with maybe $50,000 from one game. Maybe. On this fifth grader show, the following question, had the contestant attempted it and gotten it right, would have been worth a cool million - and that’s in United States dollars, presumably.

Who was the first Secretary of the Treasury?

You know how long it takes to win a million on Jeopardy!? Remember Ken Jennings, the guy who won seventy-odd games of Jeopardy! a couple of summers ago? He was on Jeopardy! all summer and won a little over two million dollars. But you can go on this fifth grader thing and win a million by knowing who the first Secretary of the Treasury was.

But that’s not the best part. The contestant who was on when I sat down with my vegetable lo mein - which came with rice, for some reason - was set this mind-numbing bit of trivia:

What is the only continent that is also a country?

She stood there and pondered for a few seconds, thinking out loud. “Well, North America is.” As though that were the most obvious thing in the world. Then she actually named off all seven continents, out loud! (Remarkably, she actually knew all seven continents.) But then she couldn’t make up her mind which one was the right answer. She chose, instead, to walk away - to take the money she had already won, rather than risk losing everything (or whatever) if she got it wrong. Once she had made her decision, Mr. Foxworthy asked her what her answer would have been.

(This is the payoff, by the way. You all have followed along admirably to this point, and you’re about to be rewarded. But you might want to sit down first, or hold on to something sturdy. Here’s what she said.)

“Well...all of them, right?”

Swear to Darwin. That’s what she said.

The answer, of course, was Australia - and I have no good explanation for why both of my Amazing True Stories posts have tilted on Australia. It is odd, however. And I figured something light was in order after that last post.