It is 23.54. I’m late. I am at least an hour or so from home. And my girlfriend has left 3 answerphone messages, and 2 texts to track me down. I have had 3 slices of pizza, 2 glasses of champagne, and Idontknowhowmany beers. I narrowly escaped the magnetic vortex pull of Soho Karaoke, and now I’m on my way home wearing a school tie.

Yes, tonight was Rock Trivia night!

To the uninitiated, Rock Trivia is an event hosted by Virgin Radio (or “Blah” Radio… no-one will tell me what the new name is – I wonder if the new owners even know?). It’s a pub quiz of sorts, except not in a pub. It’s held in the Zoo. No, not that sort of zoo. The Virgin Radio Zoo. A posh word for their canteen and bar area.

We gathered 20 of us from the Microsoft marketing team (contrary to popular belief we do see sunlight, and we don’t talk in zeros and ones). We also invited another 5 from our respective agencies, and broke off into 5 teams of 5 – so that’s 4 teams from Microsoft, and 1 team made up of some of our agency staff.

Team names duly assigned, we rocked up to Golden Square. Bringing props in tow associated with our respective team names – hence the tie, because my team was “School of Rock”.

Everybody made an enormous effort. Apart from one team. Guess which one? Yep, the Agency team. Too cool for school in their black suits and funny-shaped “advertising” glasses.

I had a quiet word with the agency team in advance and let them know it would be bad form to beat the clients on any work event… let alone this particular quiz, where the pre-match competitiveness amongst our own people alone had reached feverish levels.

You’d think none of them would wish to break the cardinal sin of beating the client at their own game. Did they abide by this? In a word, no. They ignored my advice and romped home with a very convincing victory. (Still, they did pass on the first prize to the runners-up team – thanks guys.)

The evening was a bit of a blur – lots of questions, lots of rounds – you know the drill on these things. With one exception. There was one thing that made the evening unique. The “Golden Square Fruit Run” round.

The GSFR round was conceived thanks to Walkers crisps who had left some fruit costumes (lemon, banana etc) lying around for a week-long breakfast promo. One bright spark – you know who you are CG - had the idea of dressing us up in these costumes and making us sprint round the square as fast as we could, with bellies full of beer. Imagine if Stella Artois sponsored Its-A-Knockout…you get the picture.

To round the evening off, the Goldson Mobile Karaoke swung into town – with Zoo Karaoke swiftly descending into Soho Karaoke, at which point I saw my opportunity and bailed out for the last train home.

Ben Jones link

Thanks to the Virgin team for a memorable night out - it’s safe to say that on the following morning, productivity levels in the office were a little lower than usual!

Paul