Oh dear.<\/p>\n
Once upon a time, long ago, when Peter and I were courting, the US bombed Libya. As a result, US air travel to Europe fell off big time. British Airways’ response to this was to give one June day’s worth of its US-departing transatlantic seats away, by way of a raffle (they called the campaign “Go For It, America!”). You cut out the coupon in the paper, filled in your personal info, sent it off to BA, and waited. And astonishingly (because I had never before won anything in my life) I won a round-trip ticket on the second draw.<\/p>\n
Before this happened, though, I’d said to myself, “And in case I don’t<\/i> win…” — and ticketed myself on another BA flight in July of the same year. (This was in the days when I would still fly<\/i> BA, though. Not any more. Staff attitudes toward their passengers have changed greatly since then: you get tired of the cattle prods after a while.)<\/p>\n
Well, the prize tickets came through, and I got on the plane, very happy to be seeing Peter a little sooner than originally planned. One of the things that happened on the flight was that the airline was running a quiz. They would pass out little cards to the passengers: the cards had multiple-choice general knowledge questions on them, and a final “tie-breaker” question. You would fill in the card and hand it back in, and the staff would tote up the results. And the winner on that flight got a prize — say, a week in a luxury condo in London. The winners’ cards, though, from all the flights for that week, would then go into a big draw — and the prize would be the condo itself.<\/p>\n
Well, I found this pretty attractive at the time. Now, on that first flight, when I looked at the card they gave me, I knew I wasn’t going to win the quiz that day. But I looked at the questions and recognized a pattern. The questions were exactly the kind you would derive from data in an Information Please<\/i> Almanac. There was some math involved, too, but all the same, I looked at that card and thought: “If you got on the plane with an IP<\/i> Almanac and a calculator, you could ace this sucker.”<\/p>\n
So I went to London, and Belfast, and saw Peter, and then came home again. And when I boarded the later flight which I had ticketed myself, I was carrying an Information Please<\/i> Almanac and a calculator. And what the heck? I aced that sucker. The prize was a Stg 500 shopping spree at Harrods. (Unfortunately I did not go on to win the big prize, which was a Stg 10,000 shopping spree…but at the time I could have cared less: I was with Peter.) P. and I met in London, shopped like crazy, used the change from the shopping to have more fun still (the 500 pounds were paid to us as Harrods “scrip”, and every time you bought something with it, you got normal money back), and generally enjoyed ourselves like mad.<\/p>\n