Dixon gets a reminder that it’s never different, and numbers depend on how you look at them.
We held the Christmas party at the local pub this year. It was a bit of a comedown from when the budget stretched to more salubrious establishments, but miles better than the year when the party was cancelled altogether and we bought all-day bus tickets and rode around on public transport. The party put a new spin on the idea of a “black swan” event. That’s because the pub where we held the event is called The Black Swan. It’s only had this name for a couple of years; when markets were good it was called the Broker and Bull. When the global financial crisis came, it changed its name to The Black Swan. A more contemporary name for it might be The Bailout and Bonus.
The barman at The Black Swan, Nassim, has spent his life working on a theory that most ordinary people are irrational. His favourite topic of conversation is why people can’t readily understand that there are things they don’t know, and why they can’t protect themselves, even against things they know they don’t know. It all depends on how you look at things, he says. Never, ever assume that your perspective is the only one, nor that your experience equips you to always correctly predict the outcome of any given scenario. I suppose that’s a consequence of working in a job where he watches people devotedly pursue the same course of action, day after day, seemingly unaware of the inevitable outcome, either because they’ve forgotten what happened last time or because they genuinely believe that this time it will be different. Nassim knows what will happen, and he’s always right: It’s never different.
We never learn and, as if to prove his thesis, my hangover the day after the Christmas party could have felled a rhinoceros. You’ve seen the movie, The Hangover? OK, so in my case there were no chickens, strippers, tigers, Mr Chow, weddings, stun-guns, babies in cupboards, blackjack, incidents of auto-dentistry or anyone called Doug … there might have been someone called Doug … but otherwise it was just like the movie. I woke up feeling like Zach Galifianakis looks, and talking like Mike Tyson talks. Having a somewhat imperfect recollection of the previous day (and night), I found I had a number written on my arm in texta – or scrawled, more accurately – as if the texta had been held by someone trying to write while simultaneously fending off an overly-amorous bull elephant.
The number ran from my elbow to my wrist: 0110015306909. It’s never a good to get home after a big night out with someone else’s phone number tattooed on your arm (although on a list of body parts you could wake up to find a tattoo on, your arm isn’t the worst). It took some scrubbing, but eventually it faded enough to be more or less unnoticeable, as long as I remembered to stand with my arms a particular way – a bit like Mr Gumby in the Monty Python sketches. The great Number Mystery dragged on for several days. It wasn’t a phone number, nor was it, apparently, a bank account number. It didn’t tally with any number recorded in our client files.
It wasn’t until I found a Post-It note with a reminder to ring a colleague, Bob, that I worked it out. Bob is an art movie buff. He somehow wrangled tickets to a French-language film festival, and he decided he’d enjoy the “fillums” a lot more if he could speak the language. But when I spoke to him, he was not happy. In fact, he’d had a truly terrible time, and from what I could make out (it wasn’t a good connection), he was blaming me. As a pre-Christmas gift, a sort of premature Kris Kringle, I had given him a crash-course “teach yourself French” kit, where you listen to a series of CDs and learn the basics through a process of mindless repetition (learning French is like, and about as much use as, RG146). Bob diligently put on the CDs, but he was putting them on as he went to bed each night. Now he can speak French fluently, but only when he’s asleep. But worse, whenever anyone speaks to him in French, he dozes off – so you can imagine his film festival experience was not everything that he’d wished for. Nor was his quest to meet “sexy French sheilas”, as he so eloquently put it. As they whispered sweet riens to him, he started snoring. They all thought he was narcoleptic.
Bob whinged, and the penny dropped. He had left on his French sojourn on January 10. I suddenly realised that if I looked at the faded number on my arm upside down – or the right way up, from the perspective of the person who wrote it (now that I think about it, it may have been Bob … or Doug) – that’s exactly what it said: 011001 5306 909 = “bob goes 10/01/10” – only upsidedown. So, one mystery solved. As Nassim reminded me when I next worked hard to prove that this time it would be different, when it comes to numbers, so much depends on how you look at them.
