Inbox Zero: Office Life Trivia

Email's CC field is named after a thin inked sheet that typists slipped between pages to make a duplicate. What was it?

• Tracing paper
• Carbon paper
• Blotting paper
• Tissue paper

Answer: Carbon paper. CC means carbon copy. The inked sheet pressed a second copy onto the page underneath as the typist hit each key.

"No team should be bigger than two pizzas can feed." Which company founder made that a working rule?

• Mark Zuckerberg
• Bill Gates
• Jeff Bezos
• Steve Jobs

Answer: Jeff Bezos. Bezos used the two-pizza team at Amazon to keep groups small, so they talk less and ship faster.

Sending the first email between networked computers in 1971, Ray Tomlinson needed a symbol no username would contain. Which key did he pick?

• The # (hash) sign
• The @ (at) sign
• The & (ampersand)
• The % (percent) sign

Answer: The @ (at) sign. @ was rarely used and already read as "at", so user@machine made instant sense.

Junk email is called spam after a 1970 TV sketch in which a café's menu is drowned out by one word. Which comedy team made it?

• Monty Python
• The Goodies
• The Two Ronnies
• The Goons

Answer: Monty Python. In the Flying Circus sketch, Vikings keep chanting "Spam" until nobody can talk, the way junk mail drowns an inbox.

The last line on most meeting agendas is AOB, where the long chats tend to begin. What does it stand for?

• All on board
• Action on board
• Agenda over break
• Any other business

Answer: Any other business. Any other business is the slot for everything that wasn't on the agenda.

In a US Civil War prison camp, guards could shoot anyone who crossed a marked line. Offices now use its name for due dates. Which word?

• Deadline
• Borderline
• Bottom line
• Cut-off

Answer: Deadline. At Andersonville prison, the deadline was a boundary that prisoners were shot for crossing.

A 3M chemist made a glue too weak to be useful. A colleague later used it to stop bookmarks falling out of his hymn book. The result?

• Masking tape
• Paper clip
• Glue stick
• Post-it note

Answer: Post-it note. Spencer Silver's weak glue plus Art Fry's choir bookmarks became the Post-it note.

Only one of these 10-letter office words can be typed using just the top letter row of a QWERTY keyboard. Which?

• Stationery
• Whiteboard
• Typewriter
• Paperclips

Answer: Typewriter. T, Y, P, E, W, R and I all sit on the top row. The other three need keys from the middle or bottom rows.

During the Second World War, people wore paper clips on their lapels to show quiet defiance of the Nazi occupation. Which country?

• France
• Poland
• Netherlands
• Norway

Answer: Norway. Norwegians wore them as a sign of standing together; many also believed a Norwegian had invented the clip.

You were BCC'd on an email and you hit Reply All. Who receives your reply?

• Only the original sender
• Everyone in the To and CC fields
• Nobody, because BCC replies bounce
• Only the other BCC recipients

Answer: Everyone in the To and CC fields. Your reply goes to the sender and every To and CC address, which tells them you were quietly copied. Other BCC recipients stay hidden.

At Xerox PARC in the 1970s, Larry Tesler named two editing commands after the way editors once trimmed paper drafts and stuck pieces back with glue. Which pair?

• Cut and paste
• Undo and redo
• Drag and drop
• Save and print

Answer: Cut and paste. Tesler is credited with cut, copy and paste. Apple's Lisa and Macintosh made them standard in the early 1980s.

The Save button in most office apps still shows a picture of something few new joiners have ever used. What?

• A cassette tape
• A floppy disk
• A CD-ROM
• A memory card

Answer: A floppy disk. The icon is a 3.5-inch diskette, which wasn't even floppy. It stayed because everyone recognises it.

VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet for personal computers, was so useful in 1979 that businesses bought one machine just to run it. Which?

• IBM PC
• Commodore 64
• Apple II
• ZX Spectrum

Answer: Apple II. VisiCalc is often called the first killer app. The IBM PC only arrived in 1981.

The world's first webcam was set up in a Cambridge University computer lab so researchers could check on something without leaving their desks. What?

• A coffee pot
• The printer queue
• The car park
• A fish tank

Answer: A coffee pot. The Trojan Room coffee pot camera began in 1991 and went on the web in 1993, so nobody walked to an empty pot.

In 1982 a Carnegie Mellon professor suggested marking jokes on an online message board with three characters read sideways. What did he type?

• LOL
• <3 (a heart)
• ^_^ (happy eyes)
• :-) (a smiley)

Answer: :-) (a smiley). Scott Fahlman proposed :-) for jokes and :-( for serious posts, and the smiley spread across the early internet.