5th of March Incident

The 5th of March Incident (also known as the Thermaddorean Reaction) is a feat of quizbowl near-superhuman heroism associated with several prominent writers and players of the post-Weiner Era. It was one of the many repercussions after the sudden self-removal of Matt Weiner from Quizbowl left a gigantic void (see figure) of questions and tasks needed to be done.

Background

Before 2015, much of HSAPQ's workload consisted of writing questions for David Madden's history tournament, a situation which many HSAPQ writers did not find particularly enjoyable. However, for 2015, Weiner had decided to take on the entirety of the NHBB and IHBB workload on his own, not wanting to foist it on others any longer. However, upon Weiner's resignation on a Thursday, this left an entire NHBB A-set to write by that following Saturday, consisting of 13 packets of tossups in various confusing non-20/20 formats, with no already-outlined distribution or QEMS entry.

Setup

Enter Eric Mukherjee; upon being told of the predicament by Dave Madden around 3PM EST, Mukherjee took it upon himself to coordinate the writing of the set, rapidly assembling as many writers as possible and slapping together a writing spreadsheet. Upon realizing that no easy to use distribution was available, Rob Carson and Max Schindler began to reverse-engineer the distribution from Madden's documents of question percentages, which one imagines involved a lot of multiplication and moving the decimal point over two places.

Blitz

The stage was set; with over 30 writers assembled in the password-protected IRC room #NHBBblitz, and several others (quizbowl hero Ezequiel Berdichevsky most notable among them) emailing questions from afar, writing began in earnest, coordinated by Mukherjee and Rob Carson, who served as editor for the cultural categories. As more and more writers joined the effort and the spreadsheet became awash with completed answerlines, it appeared that the tournament was going to finish in record time...

Endgame

..and it did. 11 hours after Eric's coup, the set was deemed "written". By 8PM EST on Friday, thanks to the editing team of Rob Carson, Dan Puma, Tejas Raje, Evan Adams, Chris Manners, Chris Ray, Bernadette Spencer, Jeff Hoppes, Patrick Liao, Andrew Ibendahl, and Matt Bollinger, the tournament was in the hands of the relevant authorities, in more or less usable shape.

Trivia

• The original password to the IRC channel was "liafell", a misspelling of "Lia Fail", the name of the magical stone in Irish mythology that would cry out when the rightful High King of Ireland would place his feet on it. However, Ike Jose accidentally revealed the password in the main IRC room, forcing it to be changed to something else.
• The incident was not the only bailout incident in quizbowl history (far from it); however, it is believed to have been the fastest time an entire set has been written from near-scratch.