Give a woman the right pair of shoes and she could rule the world....but never give her a microphone...

On Friday night I went to a charity quiz night to raise funds for a particular local charity not far from my studio. They run the quiz this time every year and it gets great support from my previous employer, a company set up to support the local area charity and voluntary sector.

I went to the quiz 2 years ago with some friends from work and our team won. The format was fun with a booklet of dingbats and baby photos to guess at throughout the evening along with several rounds of questions read out over a microphone.

This year however the quiz was not as much fun as it had been previously. For a start, the quiz mistress seemed to think she belonged on television. She was loud and brash and as the night wore on and more wine entered her blood stream she became frankly, offensive.

It's often the case that in the community sector people tend to get to know each other and voluntary organisations often attend networking events and everyone tries to support each other so perhaps she unwittingly believed she knew everyone in the room and could be offensive without anyone taking her seriously. However I've worked in this sector, in this area, for 6 years and I've never seen her before in my life. My boyfriend works in a different area and the majority of our team also work and live in a different borough entirely.

When approaching the organisers to verify an instruction one of my team mates was rudely subjected to an impatient sigh and the words "like I already explained" from the quiz mistress.

Debates came up about the answers to some questions... How many fingers does Homer Simpson have? Well as he is well capable of holding a beer can we have to assume he has thumbs so that would be 6 fingers and 2 thumbs... No? No apparently he has 8 fingers (and presumably no thumbs.) "That's what it says on my answer sheet so that is the answer."

In the audio music round we had to guess the song title and artist from the intro. The answer to song number 2 was "the first cut is the deepest" by Rod Stewart.... Except we all know what Rod Stewart sounds like right? Gravelly distinctive voice? Yeah what she played to us was Cat Stevens. And Cat Stevens naturally was the answer we put down. We lost half a point. Naturally when we got home we went straight on to YouTube to compare all recorded versions of the song and were in no doubt whatsoever that we were right....furthermore the intro to the Rod Stewart version was completely different to the intro of both the Cat Stevens and PP Arnold versions.

Try this dingbat:

Ton
4
Head legs arms

You get "wait for nobody" right? Coz ton is a weight and there's arms legs and head but no body...yeah? Right?

No apparently the correct answer was "wait for no man" because only men have heads arms and legs while women have...I don't know what!

The whole room erupted shouting "body" she shouted "man" we shouted "body she shouted "man" we shouted "body" she shouted "I'm not going to argue about it the answer is man" we boo-ed, we shouted, we rose to our feet like an angry crowd at a football match and she threatened to have us all thrown out. Someone in our team shouted "burn her"... It descended into chaos. My boyfriend stood up and put his coat on intent on walking out in disgust but was stuck in the corner of the booth and couldn't get out.

A poor end to what could've been an otherwise fun night.

Give people a microphone and they think they rule the world! The shame of it is that as a result of the rudeness of the host and the use of questions that clearly whoever wrote the quiz didn't know the answers to, I've lost all desire to, not only attend future quizzes but, offer any support otherwise to the charity. People have made an effort to come out on a Friday night for a fun evening in an attempt to raise money for a good cause but have been subjected to rudeness and ridicule by the staff of the very charity looking for their support...talk about biting the hand that feeds them.

I should've stayed in on my sofa.