Thomas de Quincey quipped in his essay Of murder considered one of the Fine Arts that you start by allowing yourself to kill someone and end up losing your education and leaving things for the next day. Conversely, if society tolerates a group of cheaters cheating to win a quiz competition at the local pub, there is a risk that the foundations of social coexistence will begin to collapse.
The owners of The Barking Dog establishment (The Barking Dog), in Urmston, a town located in the county of Greater Manchester, recently embarked on the typical tasks of Mrs Marple, the adorable English lady with investigative skills created by Agatha Christie, to unmask the team of customers who every week, inevitably, won the prize of 30 pounds (about 34 euros) for having answered the quiz correctly.
THE Quiz Night is a British tradition that emerged in the 1970s to liven up weekday pub evenings and attract customers. In the United Kingdom, any excuse is a good one to have a drink, and the idea of competing in a quiz competition on various topics (history, sport, science, entertainment…) while pints of beer flowed was a success, also copied internationally. Today there are nearly 10,000 teams across the country.
The group that sparked perplexity and suspicion in The Barking Dog was made up of three or four middle-aged, discreet, rather unsociable members, who didn’t even spend their reward vouchers on drinks. They answered with certainty increasingly diabolical and dark questions, designed to try to reveal their trap.
A detail put the owners on track. The team was able to answer each question separately, but lacked the creative ability to find the relationship between all the answers. For example, by putting together the first letters of all of them, the resulting phrase was The Barking Dog, the name of the venue.
The use of cell phones was prohibited during the competition. Yet the alleged impostors continued to win every night. Until an anonymous tip put the club’s managers on the trail: they had to pay close attention to the wrists of the members of the suspicious team.
Rob Hardie, the director of pubhe started working as a detective. One night he strategically stopped outside the club to observe the team’s maneuvers from the window. From his position he could see how each of them whispered discreetly to his own smart watch (smart watch) every time the contest host asks a question. Hardie told all the British media covering the “barking dog mystery” that one of the contestants, fearing exposure, covered her watch with her sweater sleeve, but continued to approach the device to demand answers.
Taken flagrantly At the time they committed their crime, the management of The Barking Dog decided to ban the team of criminals from future participation in a competition, and they proclaimed their decision on a poster, to encourage the return of customers who had defected out of frustration.
“Banned. Last night a team was caught cheating during the competition. While some may believe it is nothing serious, we know other teams have stopped coming because of them,” the accusatory proclamation explains.
Always with that British impulse not to fall into exaggeration or excess, and to act according to the norm, the pub management preferred do not reveal the identity of the scammers. And in principle the accumulated rewards remain valid for one year. Local customers will be waiting all this time to see if they will be reckless, or have the courage, to try to exchange them for a few pints and thus solve the mystery.
