The Mystery Teammate

My trivia teammate "Nina" was already at the bar when I arrived. Sitting across the table from her was a dude, "Carl", who I assumed was some friend of Nina's I didn't know. Meanwhile, Nina was messily eating chicken wings. "Mmm, mmm, I love chicken," she told me with sauce all over her face and fingers. Though I couldn't pinpoint what, something was off.

The rest of the team arrived, and some of the members weren't even formally introduced to Carl, but we accepted him as our own. Things came to a head on a particular question about elements when the majority of the team wanted to say "gold", but Carl argued "silver". We ended up going with Carl - whoever he was - because he said he had a degree in earth science. The answer was gold, though, and we lost a lot of points. We put more blame on Nina than Carl because we actually knew her and she brought him, and she just made awkward faces and left the table. In fact, she repeatedly left the table throughout the night to make phone calls, abandoning her friend.

Carl made it up to us, however, by kicking butt in the drinking round, winning us all shots. Now we loved Carl! Nina didn't seem to love Carl, however, pretty much ignoring him. Before the last round, Nina got up and left without saying goodbye. We figured she would return, but she didn't. Carl sat around waiting, and finally excused himself, too. Before he left, Jared invited Carl to play golf with him sometime, and encouraged him to come back and join us for trivia in the future, saying, "We're here every week."

One of the teammates received a text from Nina apologizing for the awkwardness. Apparently, Carl was Nina's blind date who she met at the bar earlier for dinner. When she decided she didn't like Carl, she tried to get rid of him before trivia started, but then the teammates arrived and were friendly with him. So Nina ended up ditching her date with us, while we were unaware of the dynamic at hand. We could have helped Nina get rid of him, but instead we made him part of the team and asked him to hang out again.

Poor, Carl. The only situation that would be more awkward is if he actually did show up and join us at trivia again.