So This Was Terrifying
I love to travel and when my wife and I knew we were going to have our first child, we made it a goal of ours to leave the country at least once each year. Our reasoning was that the first time would be the hardest, but we were relatively young and could handle it, and that it would only get easier as our kid (now kids) got used to it. And we had a pretty impressive streak going until Covid intervened with our kiddos getting their passports stamped in places such as Switzerland and Nicaragua.
Travel is not without risk, though, and there was the one time in Norway a train left an isolated station in the mountains with my wife on it and my newborn son and I not. Or when we ended up in an emergency room in rural Catalonia thinking we were just going to a party to build some human pyramids.
That lesson was relearned (I both love and hate relearning things) again this year when we ventured back abroad to Ireland. The trip felt snakebit from the start. Our flight over was delayed hours because some dudes headed to Ibiza dropped acid before boarding the plane, started freaking out during taxi, and had to be escorted off (and their checked baggage too) by police. Then within minutes of driving a rental car on the “wrong side” (hastily because we were hours behind schedule) I rubbed a curb and had the “Check Tire” light go on (but it never went flat). And a few days after that my daughter got stung by a weever while boogie boarding and had to be carried up a steep cliff from the beach to have her foot soaked in near boiling water to avoid unconsciousness.
But the piece de resistance came on the last day. Driving back to Dublin from West Cork, we stopped at Avoca, a fantastic Irish woolen mill that also serves great food, for lunch and shopping. We parked and went in to eat and in the modern tradition, the restaurant listed the ingredients and allergens in each dish on its menu.
The important information here is that none of us are allergic to anything except for my son who is allergic to pine nuts. But because encountering pine nuts is relatively infrequent and we have no other allergies, we (or just me) are perhaps not as vigilant about this situation as we should be. That said, my son wanted to get the prosciutto and brie sandwich (don’t judge us) and as far as we could tell from the allergens listed, pine nuts were not an ingredient. Then we got the sandwich and looked at it and there was some red stuff on it that looked like sundried tomatoes. Again, all good. But then he took a few bites…
“Does this sandwich have pine nuts?” he asked forebodingly.
Again, we checked the menu. No pine nuts.
“My throat is closing.”
“Maybe we should ask.”
Long story short, the red stuff turned out to be red pepper pesto with pine nuts and my wife had to stab my son in the thigh with the epipen we were carrying to keep him from going into anaphylactic shock. Even better, we were just hours from boarding the flight home so had the stress and tension of trying to decide if we should even get on that flight over the Atlantic.
Everything worked out fine, but still!
The point is that risk is everywhere, but that one of the most dangerous risks is a false sense of security. What I told the restaurant is either put all of the ingredients on the menu or none because putting just some made the situation the worst it could possibly be. Absent any information, I think I would have scrutinized that red stuff more.
We had a similar situation at one of our businesses, which was performing poorly and running tight on cash. We had cash flow forecasts, but found that they were always wrong. But because we were deciding things based on inaccurate forecasts, we realized that we were making worse decisions than if we had no forecasts at all.
It’s terrifying to think that there are situations that are made better by having no information rather than some information, but I’m now terrified by incomplete information. I guess “All or nothing” is a saying for a reason.
– By Tim Hanson
