Facts About Wheel of Fortune, With Unverified Explanations
by LE Correia
For exactly two weeks, I worked in the production offices of the popular game show Wheel of Fortune. Here are some things that I learned.
I learned that: As the receptionist, I was not permitted to give out Vanna White’s age over the phone.
This is because: Her true age is a slippery number, one that eludes even her closest confidants. See, Vanna’s age is not a simple function of linear time like yours or mine. Today, I’m told, she is 57, although she was certainly 68 last week.
I know what you’re thinking. But no, she does not age backward, and no, it’s not a “dog years” thing like everyone thought during her divorce. In fact, no algorithm has ever successfully predicted Vanna White’s age, which can fluctuate five or six times in a single day. (On three separate occasions during my employment, Vanna turned ninety. The Production Coordinator broke out a novelty ear trumpet emblazoned with, “Hey! Speak up! I’m NINETY!” and everyone had a working hard/hardly working sort of lunch hour.)
This is because: Vanna White has moods, and she cannot express them via natural facial expression or off-prompter language, both of which she abstains from. Instead, her repressed tempers and urges generate small amounts of antimatter, which fracture spacetime and spontaneously determine Vanna’s age while she smiles at consonants.
Bonus trivia: Pat Sajak has a tattoo of a Feynman diagram. But where?
***
I learned that: The writers of Wheel of Fortune are exclusively referred to as “puzzle boys.”
This is because: “The Puzzle Boys” proper are actually an exclusive puzzling fraternity to which the WoF writers belong. Every ultra-famous puzzle designer you could possibly think of was once a member of this brotherhood — everyone from Will Shortz, to Will Shortz, to the great New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz.
***
I learned that: During tapings, a live feed of the show plays on a concealed, muted television beneath the receptionist’s desk. The receptionist is not allowed to turn the set off, despite how distracting and poorly interlaced it is.
This is so that: The receptionist feels naughty for watching TV on the job.
This is so that: The receptionist answers the phone as if she has a secret.
This: Titillates the elderly.
Bonus Trivia: In between takes, when no one is looking, Pat Sajak levitates and feels completely alone.
***
I learned that: Harry Friedman, the octogenarian WoF Executive Producer, is able to type on a common keyboard and send a perfectly effectual instant message.
However: He insists on using a 30-year-old Amtel messaging system to communicate with reception instead. Each module looks like a large adding machine. Dated, but from no era in particular, like every dummy electronics device on display in a discount furniture store. The Amtel transmits short side-scrolling messages via simple numeric input. Pressing two, for instance, will send the phrase “Take a message,” and that phrase will take roughly fifteen minutes to crawl across the receptionist’s punishing little calculator display.
This is because: Harry Freidman is a frenzied lunatic who once said, “I’m taking all the letters! And if you want them back you’ll have to play my little game.”
Bonus trivia: Pat Sajak creates free WiFi wherever he goes.
***
I learned that: There is something called a “Wheelmobile.”
This is because: Every American would like to see the Wheel spin just once before her cheeks turn cold and the world forgets her name. To feel her heart quicken each time that weird rubber stopper flick-flack flick-flacks blindly past Bankruptcy. To peer into the blur of lost turns and dollar signs and Maxwell House-sponsored bonus wedges, and perhaps see the faces of her children flash by. No … not her children. Just some children she’s never met, with happy faces. To think, “How like life, this whirling game of destiny! And how very much like death.”
So a facsimile of the Wheel was built and put on a tour bus, that the travel-wary and the motion-resistant might glimpse it in their own crumbling cities.
This is because: The Wheel itself cannot and shall not be moved.
Because: It sits on top of a Liquefied Natural Gas reserve. Removing the Wheel (or angering it) would cause an uncontainable and highly toxic leak. It would poison thousands and render Culver City, California, uninhabitable for decades.
This: Ensures that the show will never be cancelled.
This: Soothes the elderly.
LE Correia is from Massachusetts, where she grew up and attended Emerson College, in no particular order. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she writes and works in TV production. Once, an episode of Chopped unexpectedly moved her to tears. Other than that, she views all television and all human emotion with an unsettlingly clinical remove.