I used to bartend for this popular place off a rural highway in my state…

I used to bartend for this popular place off a rural highway in my state. It marketed itself as a tavern, to get tourists to come in and buy a bite to eat, but the locals knew it by the name of the former owner, Pete. Pete had died a few years before I started working there. His younger brother ran the place, but Pete had a kid, Junior who had some kind of cognitive issue. Junior was in his thirties and didn’t have much to do with himself, apparently, so he spent his whole day in front of a gadget that was kinda like a slot machine, except that its results were based on particular punch cards put into it by Junior. He was always changing his cards and cutting out new punch cards out of card stock, and that gave him a lot to do. He would narrate himself doing so, in a soft voice, saying to himself, “Scan da red, uh. Scan the orange, uh.” And so on. He seemed to feel completely fulfilled in his day, doing this. Just playing with his machine. Again, the kid had some kind of cognitive delay, I don’t know what. To keep him out of the way during the course of business, but also be able to keep an eye on him, Pete Senior had set him up in a corner where the overhead lights had shorted out due to water damage, surrounded him with pinball machines for the rare moments he got bored of his contraption, and otherwise the rule was to let him be. He spent many hours per day simply running through his little ritualistic, “Scan da blue, uh. Scan da yellow, uh.” That was pretty much all he did. So aside from Junior, there was a pompous professor asshole who was a regular at the bar. He insisted we start a trivia night, and put one of the other guys up to hosting it. And then this pompous professor started winning all the prize money. I guess he really knew a lot of trivia, because three times out of four, he and whatever of his professor buddies joined his team won these trivia nights. It started really killing the spirit of the thing, all the other regulars were pretty blue collar guys, and they were pissed at how this professor and his buddies outclassed them in knowledge of everything but football, NASCAR, and automotive mechanics. So, I got a lot of complaints from the other guys. One night, though, it seems that this pompous professor’s buddies got tired of the exercise, and none of them showed up for trivia. The professor said he’d play alone. The other guys pointed out the rules that he needed a team mate or he couldn’t compete. I think they were hoping he would leave? But the professor just chuckled and asked Junior to be his team mate. The poor kid was never asked to join anything ever, so he eagerly agreed. He brought his punch card machine and sat in the trivia room, at the professor’s table, eagerly popping in his cards into the machine over and over in his excitement. “Scan da green, uh,” Junior said, narrating his effort to put the green punch card in the machine. Then he removed it in a systematic fashion. “Scan da aquamarine, uh.” And so the trivia game started, the other guys at least satisfied that Junior’s shenanigans might distract the professor enough for them to get some points. Now whether from luck or sheer genius, the professor was still winning by the end of the night. It was neck and neck with a team of regulars who I was really rooting for. The two final competing teams were head to head, in a sudden death speed round. With that thin of a margin, you can understand why the other team would be giving the professor a hard time. The question was asked, “Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are the primary countries in this region of Europe.” Ding! The Professor’s bell went, and the game host acknowledged the claim. But before the Professor could speak, someone shouted, “Junior is on your team, and I haven’t heard him speak once.” “Yeah,” came another, “he should answer at least one question, or else it isn’t a team!” The clear implication was that, if the professor didn’t let Junior speak, he would therefore be disqualified. The professor was about to answer again, but the host was persuaded. “Very well,” the host said, and pointed to Junior. “Junior - can you answer the question?” As Junior was clearly absorbed in his punch cards, it was evident that Junior was likely not even going to have heard the question much less answer it correctly. To give him a fighting chance, the trivia host took pity upon him and repeated the question. The professor was clearly sweating bullets, and he sat there with bated breath, just watching Junior. Clearly he was expecting for his carefully made plan to backfire. Junior sat there a long time, staring at his punch cards. Finally, after some contemplation, he nodded and gestured to his stack of punchcards, and selected a dark blue one. He prepared it to go into his machine, and then pronounced: “Scan da navy, uh.”