Okay, I admit it. I was a band nerd in high school. But it wasn't just any band, it was marching band. You know, the kind where you get on a football field and march around to make all kinds of neat designs when you look at the entire formation from the bleachers. So when we were learning these formations, there was a lot of downtime as the instructors painstakingly showed every single person where their next place was, in addition to all the times we'd run drills to get up to that particular point in the show in order to pound it into our heads. Somewhere in all of this, the inane game of "Wanna Buy A Duck?" started.

"Wanna Buy A Duck?" is by far one of the most addictive and yet annoying games to play with a large group of people. The way it works is, one person has this exchange with the person sitting next to them:
"Wanna buy a duck?"
"A what?"
"A duck."
"A what?"
"A duck."
"Does it quack?"
"Yes."

Then they each turn to the person sitting next to them and have the same exchange. The thing is that once you've played once, you have to keep the chain going -- kind of like the game Telephone. Each time, the exchange has to move one person farther out, but they always "converse" back with the original person who started this whole damn thing. So you're sitting there in a group of 100+ people, passing along these asinine one-liners back and forth around this humongous blob of people. You could be in the middle of a completely separate conversation when one of the questions or replies comes racing through your section of the group, and it might sound something like, "So I called her up the other night -- a duck -- and we talked for..."

It's stupid. I know. But it was one of those inside jokes, I guess, and it kept us all occupied for a little while. But every now & then, whenever I feel I'm embroiled in an exercise in futility or trying to talk to someone who I'm just not getting through to, I'll ask them if they wanna buy a duck.