As an executive assistant at Amazon, Stephanie Hubley’s job involves retaining and compartmentalizing information and answering questions coming at her from a variety of sources and directions. It’s a skill set that suits her strong interest in trivia games — and landed her a spot on “Jeopardy.”
Hubley, who has been at Amazon for about seven months, supports two directors and a vice president in the Kindle Reader group. She has watched the iconic game show since she was a kid, growing up in Tacoma, Wash.
“I would actually say that I’m more of a casual ‘Jeopardy’ fan than anything. It’s not like I watch the show religiously,” Hubley said. “Obviously I watched the show growing up and then every now and then when it was on TV, but really it’s because I just kind of like trivia. I did quiz bowl in high school and I do bar trivia now and so I’ve always thought it’s kind of fun.”
Hubley discovered that the show conducts online tests in search of new contestants once a year. So for the past four or five years, the 33-year-old has been trying her hand at the free test in the hopes of attracting the attention of show recruiters.
“I’ve heard that there can be between 75,000 and 100,000 people that take the test each year and they only have about 4,000 spots for in-person auditions, which is the next step,” Hubley said. “So, sometimes even if you pass you might not hear anything because they all go, I think, into a big bucket, then they just pull out ones at random.”
This past summer, she made it to the next level, and was invited to audition in person in Las Vegas. She had taken the online test before she started her new job, but when she got the call to audition, her bosses said, “That’s the coolest thing ever,” and she was told to take whatever days she needed.
Hubley, who now lives in Burien, Wash., flew down to Las Vegas for about 24 hours and took a 50-question test along with about 25 other people. She then played against others in front of contestant coordinators.
She was coached about how to project so that one-and-only “Jeopardy” host Alex Trebek would be able to hear her across the studio. And she was told to keep the game going for the sake of “energy.”
“People get really nervous and kind of closed off and they just want to see if you’re good TV,” Hubley said.
After that audition, she was told her window of eligibility, in which she could get a call to appear on the show, was 18 months. There was also the possibility that she could never be called for one of the show’s few hundred seasonal openings.
“I left feeling really good about how I did, but I also knew that if nothing came of it I would be OK with that just because I knew it was a numbers game,” Hubley said. “Then, literally 10 days later, they called me for the show. It was crazy. I did not expect something that quickly.”
She had five weeks to prepare, DVRing all the episodes of the show she could find, reading stories from former contestants online, playing the game on a website called J! Archive, and answering random trivia questions that her Amazon team members would ping her with during the day. She traveled to Los Angeles for her episode taping at the end of August.
“My background is so random, I was a humanities major in college, I had a variety of administrative jobs and now I’m an executive assistant,” Hubley said. “I kind of just have a general jack-of-all-trades knowledge base. I’m not very specialized in anything, but my brain is just full of random stuff and I kind of do different things every day and I think that kind of ties into me being able to roll with different categories and whatever comes up I can figure out a way to answer it.”
The big show
Hubley’s “Jeopardy” episode aired in Seattle on Wednesday night. It was originally scheduled for Tuesday, but a little bit of election coverage dominated the airwaves that night.
Returning champ Georjean and fellow competitor Allon were to the left and right of Hubley as the action got underway.
Her first attempt at an answer came in the “palindromes” category, and when she got it wrong, she was quickly in the hole at -$1,000.
After a commercial break, Trebek approached the contestants for his familiar get-to-know-you chat. Hubley shared a tidbit about a birthday present from her husband, which involved being able to go to an animal sanctuary and “hold and pet and feed a sloth. It was amazing. I lost my mind,” Hubley said as Trebek looked skeptical. “They’re just amazing animals. They just put it right on my lap, I was sitting down and he wrapped his arms around me and kind of dug in his claws just a little bit.”
By the end of the first round, Stephanie was at -$200 after getting a couple right and a few wrong. Gerojean was at $1,400 and Allon led with $3,800.
When the show went to commercial break, Seattle’s ABC affiliate KOMO News broke in with a lengthy report on violence in downtown Seattle in which five people were shot. By the time the report ended and “Jeopardy!” returned, Hubley was in the lead with $7,800. (Apparently, she cleaned up in a category about the city of Cleveland.)
She soon went to $9,000 when she correctly answered, in the “cry unk” category, “What is Crunk?” off the clue “It’s a style of Southern rap.”
A correction from the judges on a previous answer lowered Hubley’s score back to $7,400 and Georjean found her second Daily Double of the night — but she got it wrong.
Hubley missed a couple in the “gone fishing” category — casting! bobber! — and Georjean got the last clue of the round correct to take a slight lead going into Final Jeopardy. The category there was “Commonwealth Countries,” and the clue was, “The constitution of this country came into effect on Feb. 4, 1997 and by 2016, 13 parties were represented in its parliament.”
No one answered correctly (South Africa), but Georjean wagered too much money. That means that Stephanie Hubley, with $4,000, is the current “Jeopardy” champion.
“It was a really, really tough game and unfortunately I didn’t win very much money, but I did win,” Hubley said. “I got more than the other two contestants, which is all that matters.”
Reaction at Amazon
Hubley said the support from team members at work has been great. At the most recent Amazon all-hands meeting, some employee bios from the company’s in-house website were being highlighted and Hubley’s was among them. CEO Jeff Bezos read the information from the slide himself.
“In the middle of Key Arena, on this huge screen comes my photo and my little bio about how I’m from the Northwest and I’m going to be on ‘Jeopardy’ soon,” Hubley said.
She was sick at the time and missed the event, but team members told her all about it.
“So I actually wrote him an email because I understand that he responds to those kinds of things,” Hubley said. “I just said, ‘Thank you for the shout out, I really really appreciate it. I’m honored. We are having a watch party in Doppler if you’d like to come in a couple days.’ He wrote back and said, ‘Well, I know you’ve already taped it, but good luck. Just wanted to wish you the best.’ It was so great. I showed all of my team members that, and they were like, ‘Jeff B. knows who you are now, that’s crazy!'”
Hubley printed the email and has it displayed at her desk, she said.
On Thursday afternoon, in a gathering space in Amazon’s Doppler tower, about 100 employees gathered with Hubley to watch the episode and cheer on their co-worker.
Her bosses from the Kindle Reader group were in attendance, too. VP Jeff Kunins; Bob Roth, director of engineering; and Mike Torres, director of product management, watched from the grandstand as a giant TV screen dropped down out of the rafters in front of a small food market.
“I cleared their calendars,” Hubley said of her bosses. “I am an E.A.!”
“We’ve got a celebrity on the team,” Roth said. “The episode is what, 22 minutes? So it’s not her 15 minutes of fame, she’s getting her 22 minutes.”
Hubley welcomed the crowd and the episode started with a cheer when she showed up on the screen. Poor Georjean even got booed for being the returning champ.
Each time Hubley answered correctly, a cheer went up and people genuinely rooted her on and groaned if she got a question wrong. A few people whispered answers as they played along. The loudest cheer was mixed with laughter after she got the “crunk” question right.
Folks wandering past the event wondered allowed why so many people were watching “Jeopardy” during work hours and when told an Amazonian was on the screen, they lit up. “Oh, cool!” said one guy. “Go Stephanie!” said another.
When it was all over, a stream of people shook Hubley’s hand and asked her how the whole process works — what happens during commercial breaks, how she studied and whether Trebek is nice in person.
Her next second episode, as returning champion, doesn’t air until Nov. 23 because “Jeopardy” is airing a teen tournament for the next two weeks. She was not allowed to tell us yet how she does in that match.
