Wednesday - Accordions and Kings

Today on my drive into work, I was thinking about Joe, the Brainiac in my office. I'm not just calling him that, it's official: the folks at Yahoo! Answers have deemed him a Brainiac and flown him out to New York City to sit in a building shaped like a giant purple brain and answer questions for them this week. The only reason he got to be an official Brainiac is because he has a competitive streak, and when he started answering questions on Yahoo! Answers he gave long, insightful answers with links to his sources, which resulted in 55% of the answers he picked being deemed "best" and getting him more points. All of us in the office were playing for a period of time, but the rest of us got bored before Joe did. He also had a better strategy than the rest of us. He answered questions about things that he happened to know a lot about. I answered questions like, "What would you do for a Klondike bar?" (For the record, I got Best Answer for that one; the problem is, not enough people asked it.)

After a while, he had such a lead in the number of points he had accrued over the rest of us that we had no chance of catching up, so we stopped trying. I was in 2nd place in our office next to Joe, but I was still at least a thousand points behind him. I don't like playing any game I can't win, so I closed up my browser and got back to work.

( Brainiac and Accordion King )