Neil Pickup
Cricket Web Moderator
A couple of years ago, I read a book called "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, which talked - to put it in layman's terms - about the ideas that Donald Rumsfeld had infamously termed "unknown unknowns" in a garbled press briefing on the Afghan war. In short, the theme is that the biggest impacts on your life are the things that you have absolutely no idea about until they happen. Take the bloke who steps off the pavement into the path of your car, for instance, or the power lines collapsing in a storm, inches from your front door.
In my case, last Monday afternoon contained the e-mail saying, "Neil, someone has had to pull out of the school exchange trip. Do you fancy coming to Tokyo on Thursday?" One of my rules for working at the place I do is "never be surprised by anything", but this rather stretched the bounds of credulity. Ignoring the fact that I didn't own a suitcase, and spoke as much Japanese as I did Tagalog, I decided that saying no would be an utterly stupid thing to do, and signed myself up for nine days of chopsticks and subway trains.
Read on...
In my case, last Monday afternoon contained the e-mail saying, "Neil, someone has had to pull out of the school exchange trip. Do you fancy coming to Tokyo on Thursday?" One of my rules for working at the place I do is "never be surprised by anything", but this rather stretched the bounds of credulity. Ignoring the fact that I didn't own a suitcase, and spoke as much Japanese as I did Tagalog, I decided that saying no would be an utterly stupid thing to do, and signed myself up for nine days of chopsticks and subway trains.
Read on...