Joe Trela

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Joe Trela is a 31-year-old customer service representative from Gilroy, California, who in March 2000, became the third contestant to win the $1 million Grand Prize on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

His victory was far more dramatic than the previous two contestants, John Carpenter and Dan Blonsky, in that he answered the $1 million question but didn't appear absolutely sure about the correct answer. After roughly 15-20 minutes of silent debate (mostly edited down to about 5 minutes), he took a chance and picked a moth as the insect that inspired the term "computer bug" by shorting out an early supercomputer, after which host Regis Philbin announced that he'd won a million dollars. His mother was there to congratulate him on his victory. The million dollar question was technically inaccurate, in that the term bug was in use before the moth was found.

His victory was made even more improbable in that he had used up all of his lifelines by the $32,000 question (the 10th of 15 questions increasing difficulty) and there were no softball questions in the upper tier--something the first two contestants benefited from. He almost went home with only $1,000 when he got stumped on a question on which baseball player appeared in the most World Series games. After using the remainder of his lifelines and being steered by his lifeline to go with Reggie Jackson, he finally correctly answered Yogi Berra to lock in the guaranteed $32,000. He would then go on to answer the five most difficult questions unassisted to win the grand prize.

In a subsequent "Tournament of Champions Episode" he again got stumped on the $32,000 question, only this time his luck ran out. He got the question wrong and won only $1,000, half of which he had to give to charity, as per the show's rules concerning charity episodes.

On one of the celebrity tournament episodes, famed rapper/singer/actress Queen Latifah (who walked away with $250,000) called up Joe Trela with her Phone-A-Friend lifeline.